Dec 16, 2017

The old days when we were little kids and there was a bakery in the middle of the store across the aisle from the peanut butter.

When the shoe section was where the electronics would later be. There was a wall with Saltwater Sandals that one of my best friends always wore and the display where I got my jelly shoes, the old kind that made you feel like a princess even though your feet were sweaty. This was when, every summer, down the center aisle of the store as you passed the show section they’d have all the displays of rainbow flip flops with red, yellow, and orange stripes and the black sole. Only back then everybody called them thongs, which later made us giggle.

When my mom was in college and would take us to the store give each of us part of the list while she’d sit at a table in the deli/cafe to study. We’d go off and find our things and bring them back to her and then I guess we’d get it all together and go pay, but I don’t remember that. I just remember walking away from those little circle tables with my part of the list (or maybe with a sibling since I was the littlest) and feeling like I owned the place.

My whole life when, if you went to Freddy’s with Mom, you got a candy bar at the end. They used to only be thirty cents. She always got Mr. Goodbar.

When I was in high school and my friends and I had nothing better to do, so we’d go in the summer and wander around the store and spend a while laying on the porch swings. That was when Dan and Eric and even Ruben for a while worked there as cart pushers, wearing their black Freddy’s polos and orange safety vests and collecting the carts all over the parking lots. When it rained they wore hoodies and got wet and still preferred it to working the cash registers.

That one time I went home to visit that I think of as recently, but couldn’t have been because I went in to buy baby food for my daughter who’s eight years old now. Everything was different in a way I didn’t like and it felt strange picking out tiny little jars in a new health food section where some of the registers used to be.