this is not a travel narrative part 2
The bus rolled into the mall parking lot. I was horrified with the fact that the parking lot was filled with cars the day after Christmas. My horror was not at the defiling of the true meaning of Christmas, but more at the endurance of the mall goers. Lately, I’ve found Christmas to be exhausting with the re-learning of how to be part of a family now that I’ve moved away and the stress of trying to buy meaningful gifts. I’ve even grown uncomfortable receiving gifts and though I’m usually one of the first to jump into the car for a trip to the mall, I was glad to avoid them altogether this holiday season. These people seemed crazy. The night before, when my mom got sentimental and called all her siblings to wish them a merry Christmas, I talked to my cousin and she said she and her mom were making the two hour drive from their rural North Carolina home to the nearest mall in Norfolk, Virginia. “Err, that sounds fun,” I told my cousin wondering what the hell she and my aunt were thinking. As the bus carefully crawled through the parking lot, I tried to imagine that the mall was the one from the zombie classic “Dawn of the Dead” and that inside the shoppers were meeting an onslaught of flesh eating undead. It wasn’t so farfetched. After all, the mall where they shot that movie was in western Pennsylvania. I thought how funny it would be to see a stream of people burst from the mall doors, pounding on the bus windows seeking sanctuary. “How am I going to return this sweater now?” a woman would shriek, “there’s brains all over it!”
I liked the idea of the town’s bus stop being at the mall though. The bus stop in Carlisle had been at the mall when I was young. It was at the more abysmal of the two malls, where only the most delinquent of teenagers would even bother to hang out, and I always wondered what a town the size of Carlisle needed with two malls. It was right next to one of the only independent book shops in town. The rear entrance, facing the sidewalk and the bus stop, opened into the back of the store which was the children’s section and I recall that it always seemed to be alive and vibrant in a hyper-real explosion of frogs and other cartoon animals. But it was nice to browse through the books and oftentimes my mom would buy me a skateboard magazine, or a bmx magazine or whatever my interest happened to be that week.
The bookstore was the first to go. Then the bus stop moved. Years later, while I was in college, the mall was demolished and replaced by a Wal-Mart. The bus stop in Carlisle now resides in a truck stop on the outskirts of town near the turnpike. I find that minutiae like this – the location of a bus stop, the demise of a bookstore, the phoenix-like emergence of a Wal-Mart from the ashes of a dying mall – serve as a better metric of time than years. It scares me though, because I think that time feels like it’s moving faster and the changes to my old hometown seem more and more crazy. The places that mark events in my life are familiar, but they are no longer nostalgic and there is no comfort in their familiarity.
My mom and I walked past my old high school one afternoon while I was home. I broke off a clod of snow from the piles that had built up from where the parking lot had been plowed and kicked it in front of me. I kicked it hard and repeated this when I caught up to where my snow clod had come to rest. I finally goaded my mom into playing this game and we alternated kicks. As we walked past the school it felt like there was an invisible barrier around it and that if I crossed it, if I came too close to the school, if I thought too much about my time there, I would suddenly be acutely aware of how distant, how irrelevant that all seemed, of how much I had aged and how the place around which my entire life had once revolved now held nothing.
I had that feeling when I went to the school in Bloomington to learn how not to get HIV or hepatitis when a kid gets his hand cut off in school so that I could start substitute teaching in January. There’s something about a school that makes the people who work around a school that seems to leave a permanent mark. As I inquired with the secretary, I couldn’t help but feel like she was addressing me as some clueless high school freshman and when I spoke to another administrator she treated me with that pleasant maternity that is the mark of those who manage to find some shred of pleasure and dignity amidst what seems to me a pretty frustrating and shitty place. I had the same feeling of being uncomfortably reminded of the past, and my distance from it, when I was recognized by my 9th grade honors English teacher (who, though we were never close, was one of my favorite teachers). She patted me on the shoulder as she walked past my pew and I realized that it had been 9 years since I sat as a student in her classroom.
I’m not sure what is the worst part of being reminded of the passage of time. Is it the increasing awareness, with each passing year, with each fragmented reminder of the past, of ones disconnection from that past? Or, is it the realization that the reality of your life, the hours passed, the dedication, the frustration and the triumph of your current days will soon so pass?