An Hour at the Mall

On the way back from a weekend conference, my wife says she wants to stop at the mall.  Just for an hour or so.

I don’t like malls.  Especially huge malls like this one.  I don’t like the idea of the mall or the reality of the mall.  I don’t like the orgy of reckless consumption that they represent.  I don’t like the bright lights and the crappy pop music that bleeds incessantly through the speakers.  I don’t like the labyrinthine layouts that seem designed to trap and confuse me, imprisoning me in the mall’s frightful and constricting embrace. 

There’s a young man at the entrance of a mega-bookstore sitting at alone table.  He’s written a book about detoxifying your life. There’s a stack of books and a poster describing the wonders of this man and his book. This is a book signing, I surmise, but nobody seems to want his book or his signature.  He stares straight ahead, blankly.

A little Chinese man with a stooped back and a slightly askew mall uniform slowly walks up and down the row of urinals in the men’s washroom.  He’s probably 75 years old.  His job, today, is to make sure the shoppers’ urine is flowing properly.  I stare at him.  I try to smile.  He looks straight past me.

A toddler screams at her mother.  She wanted the other one!!

There seems to be some kind of unwritten law at work in the food court. The (mostly) darker skinned people—people from India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Vietnam, or Sudan—serve French fries and hamburgers and tacos and ice cream and coffee to the (mostly) white-skinned, heavily tattooed people.  They also wipe their tables when they are done.

There’s a store that sells very expensive handbags.  At the entrance stands a young south Asian woman.  She is very pretty.  She looks like a shopper, but after a while I notice that she doesn’t move from her spot.  Her job is simply to stand around with one of these expensive handbags.  I watch her for five minutes. She shuffles from side to side. She walks over to a pillar and leans on it for a while. She leans back and looks up at the roof. She yawns.  Then she moves back to her spot.

A boy (ten years old? eleven?) has squished himself into a stroller that sits beside one of those couches that they put in malls for people who need to rest from their shopping.  All the seats are taken, so he sits in this stroller.  He barely fits.  The stroller looks like it is about to collapse, but he doesn’t seem to notice.   His eyes are locked on to his gaming device.  There’s a plastic tree beside him.

A song by Abba plays on the mall speakers.  If you change your mind… Take a chance on me…

There’s a water fountain by the washroom that won’t turn off.  It just keeps dribbling.  I wonder if they expect the old Chinese man to come fix it when he’s finished making sure all of the urinals work.

Everything is for sale today.  So many things. Things to put on my feet, things to wear over my arms and legs, things to stick through my ears or my nose (or God knows where else). Things to put in my house or on my computer. Things to make me happy and whole. Things with names that make them very expensive, even when they are on sale.

Little kids play on a plastic playground while their parents shop.  It looks sticky.

A woman breast-feeds her baby on a bench underneath a large sign that says “Sale! 70% off!”

A group of twenty somethings with carefully distressed jeans walk loudly by.  One of them has the pinkest hair I have ever seen.

A little baby sleeps in the food court.  He’s got a soother in his mouth that makes it look like he has a mustache.  I wonder if that soother was 70% off.  I hope so.

A woman painfully lurches by with impossibly high heels and an impossibly short skirt.  She’s arm in arm with an impossibly muscular and tattooed young man.  I feel like telling them that they don’t need to try so hard, but I resist this urge.  His muscles are quite a bit bigger than mine.

Everywhere, people stare at their phones.

An enthusiastic young man waves something in my face as I walk by a store.  “Try this!”  I think it is some kind of soap, but I can’t be sure.  I don’t want to try it.

A woman waits in line in the food court.  She’s wearing a long black ankle length fur coat while she waits for Famous Wok.

A woman with a headscarf is buying an ice cream cone.  She looks happy to be buying ice cream at the mall on a cold January Sunday.

I walk by the bookstore again.  The young man with the book is still sitting there.  Alone.  He looks like he wishes he was somewhere else.  Anywhere else.

An hour at the mall has passed.  It’s time to go home.

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After pressing “Publish,” the WordPress robots informed me that this is the 800th post in the history of this blog.  I probably should have posted something a bit weightier for such a significant milestone… Ah well, this will have to do.  I’ll tell you what, the first ten comments on this post will receive 70% off their renewal fee for subscribing to this blog!  

No need to thank me.