When did I turn into my grandfather? No, I haven’t gotten short and bald-headed, nor do I have a desire to come out of retirement and practice dentistry using a foot-pedal drill on relatives in a dimly lit basement, though this may be due to my never having been a dentist.
Instead, I seem to have developed an abiding affection for things that are no more.
For instance, the other evening I got to thinking about Woolworth’s. If you are of a certain age, you may well remember F.W. Woolworth and Company, perhaps by that name or perhaps as the more generic “dime store.” And if you do, it is very possibly the aromas that you remember best.
It was the memory of that, how the place smelled, that brought it all back. Woolworth’s stores in days of yore had a candy counter with bins of various chocolates sold by the pound; also gumdrops, jelly beans, and so on. A quarter would purchase enough candy to make one fear one’s grandfather and his awful foot-pedaled dental drill (if your grandfather happened to be a retired dentist whose eyesight was no longer all that good). But the best part was free: the delectable aroma at the end of the candy counter where the heat lamp warmed cashew nuts. It was located not far from the popcorn machine, which also smelled good; there, you could get a respectable bag of fresh, warm popcorn for a dime.
There was also a pet department, of sorts. It had a tank with goldfish, and one with guppies; another, with just a couple inches of water, offered baby red-eared turtles. (We had not heard of salmonella so we never got it from baby turtles.) Larger aquaria had no water; instead, there were brightly colored wood shavings and hamsters, white mice, and, in the larger stores, guinea pigs, which squeaked cheerfully as did the hamsters’ exercise wheel. The shavings gave a nice cedar scent to the surroundings.
Woolworth’s may have sold other things, too, but I was not familiar with them.
In the midst of my reverie I realized that there aren’t any Woolworth stores anymore and that there haven’t been any for more than a decade. They hadn’t been in their heyday — as I’ve described them — for a couple of decades before that.
Talk about feeling old all of a sudden!
Our memory, I think, is a lot cleverer than we suppose. We concentrate on how things sounded and looked, but our minds are constantly storing away the experience of the other three senses. Those memories are constantly at work, even though we aren’t always conscious of them. I think that half the time we experience what we think of as deja vu, what has really happened is that we’ve caught the scent of something that reminds us of something long ago.
Like my grandfather, I am sometimes startled by the fullness of time. I can think of acquaintances and to my mind I saw them or spoke with them not long ago — but then I look a little more closely and realize that the last communication actually took place 15 years ago, or 20.
And I’m finding the past is an easier place to dwell, now that I have enough of it to set up residence there.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve devoted a lot of time to editing pictures I scanned into the computer this year. There are a lot of them — more than 25,000, and I’m not done yet. As I go through them, I remember the circumstances under which they were taken. One day last week, after several hours of this, I pushed the chair back from the desk and it took me a minute to remember where I am and what year it is! It was suddenly easier to understand how my grandfather, after telling a story of the old days, sometimes didn’t seem quite sure whether he was in Missouri in 1967 or Nebraska in 1887.
It can all be a little alarming, but the alternatives are worse. I have friends who still behave pretty much as they did in, say, high school, which strikes me as being a little absurd. Previous generations tended to grow old gracefully, to be very good at being old even though they didn’t have any experience at it until they got there. I’m not sure that my generation will ever be — how do they now say it? — age appropriate.
I knew all this would happen, of course. It is no surprise. What truly startled me was the perspective. My grandparents, and to some extent my parents, would talk of what I always considered “the olden days.” But now I find my memories are in a lot of cases more distant from today then theirs were then.
And all of a sudden, through no planning or effort of my own, I’ve turned into one of those people who talk of the past as if it were only yesterday.
A yesterday that contained, for instance, Woolworth’s.
Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.