Last weekend I went into unfriendly territory on a difficult mission; I went to the mall to get my watch battery replaced. When I was young, the mall and I were practically inseparable. I thought our love would stand the test of time and we’d be together forever. Sometime around my fortieth birthday we starting drifting apart. To be really honest, things had cooled between us all through my thirties. Stores that had once seemed so fresh and bold started feeling shallow and tacky. It wasn’t that I didn’t love the mall anymore, it’s just that I wasn’t in love with it. I’d grown and the mall hadn’t. It couldn’t give me the one thing I really wanted – a nice, quiet evening at home.
At least that’s what I told myself.
The truth is I can’t stand the mall because it makes me feel old and out of touch. It doesn’t help that when I walk in, I cause significant upward drag on the average age if you know what I mean. Looking at the various groups of feral young people, I feel like I’ve just stepped off a spaceship on an alien world. Empty space springs up around me as the youth of today rush away from the youth of several years ago. From their reaction, you’d think the kids believe that middle-age is contagious.
I guess I can’t blame them, the mall is geared toward the young. The store mannequins have forgotten how to dress decently and the jewelry stores have expanded the frontiers of body adornment in ways which used to be outlawed by the Geneva convention. The kids on the posters in the windows are young, healthy, trim, and attractive. They look exactly the way my friends and I looked at that age … in our imaginations. In truth, we looked a lot more like the skinny awkward kids you see working at the cell phone kiosks.
Kiosks make me feel old, too.
When I was young and the mall knew how to behave, the stores kept to themselves all nice and quiet-like.
Now you can’t walk the length of the mall without being stopped a dozen times by the Mall Vultures manning the kiosks. You’ll be invited to buy an impenetrable silicon jacket for your iPod, cell phone, wallet or credit card; a microwaveable bean-bag filled with aromatic herbs which are claimed to cure ailments ranging from migraines to allergies to foot odor; cell-phone upgrades and plans that improve your service while saving you money by costing you more; weight-loss supplements and potions offering a one-hundred percent success rate so long as they are coupled with a healthy diet and regular exercise; t-shirts that would fit nicely on a Barbie doll, but make actual human beings look like they’re being attacked by a brightly-colored rayon snake; remote-control toys guaranteed to work right up to the time they’re removed from the packaging; and (the biggest scam of all) real-estate.
It’s not so much walking the mall as running a gauntlet and if you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself trapped.
Let me tell you an absolutely true story that happened to me a few months ago. My wife and I had taken complete leave of our senses and decided to voluntarily walk through a shopping mall with no particular destination in mind. Big mistake. Aimlessness draws Mall Vultures the way blood draws wolves or public art draws criticism.
“Excuse me,” a friendly young man said. “May I see your hands.”
“Ummm….sure?”
“Hmmm….” the young man frowned in an exact imitation of a doctor who has just noticed a serious and previously-undiagnosed medical problem. “Your skin is very dry and rough.”
Fortunately the young man had a solution for my problem and before I could stop him, I was soaking in it.
“It’s an herbal extract blended with salt from the Dead Sea,” he explained. I nodded knowingly as if the benefits of Dead Sea salt needed no explanation. In truth, the young man had moved so fast I was afraid to argue with him. What if he decided the skin on my face was dry? I kept nodding until he let me go after I promised to think about buying a big jar of oily Dead Sea salt.
At least he looked mostly normal. Some of the kids at the kiosks have so many tattoos and piercings that they appear to be refugees from the lost tribe of careless nail-gun owners. I’m never sure if I should buy something from them or give a generous donation toward their medical costs. Annoyingly, if I do actually talk to them, they treat me like I’m the weirdo.
If you escape the Mall Vultures, you might find yourself in the food court. A really good food court combines the ambiance of a state fair (open seating, lots of noise, big barrels full of discarded food wrappers, etc.) with the cuisine of a state fair (things fried, things on a stick, things fried on a stick, fried sticks, etc.) If you can’t find something to eat at the food court … you probably have a well-honed sense of self-preservation.
Or you’re over forty and have hopes of making it to fifty without suffering coronary artery disease. The food court is just one of the many ways the mall has of telling you you’re getting older.
I thought it might be awkward going back to the mall to get my watch battery changed; after all the mall and I had meant something to each other once. Turns out I needn’t have worried. The mall’s found a new, younger customer base and from the looks of it, they’re very happy together. I’m not jealous, though. I know that in twenty or thirty years those kids will be older and the mall will have moved on to some other new love.
