Childhood

 

I like to look at the old pictures on Facebook's Bloomington Normal Remembered. It seems like only yesterday I was a child running to the grocery store for my parents back in Springfield, Illinois. The closest was a half block away. Grunwalds was a little mom and pop store. He sold meat across the back and would give me a piece of baloney or cheese while I waited for our order. She checked me out at the little counter up front. There was a small box freezer across from that counter where they sold popsicles and ice cream bars for seven to ten cents! There were two short aisles filled with bread, canned goods and a soap display showing which dishes were being packed inside the soap boxes as give aways. One year I saved a long time to buy a set of Mr. Peanut salt and pepper shakers behind that counter for my mother. I think they were $1.98. Sometimes, on Saturday mornings, my father would scrape up enough to send me to buy two packages of cinnamon rolls and we would feast on them lathered in butter.

If we wanted to stay on this side of the busy street of MacArthur, we sometimes went to Mitchel's Meat Market. It was about one city block away, a fair walk if you were carrying two big sacks of groceries, but sometimes I could ride my bike and balance a bag of groceries on the front fender while steering. Mitchel's was nearly three times as large as Grunwalds. They had a coke machine and sold giant dill pickles from a jar on top of the meat counter for a nickel. Otherwise it was much the same. He was the butcher. She was the check out. I remember one year she had a stroke and could only speak out of one side of her mouth. I was terrified by the thought of that happening.

And finally there was West Grand Market, which wasn't on west grand at all. It was run by Mr. and Mrs. Klang, but it was across MacArthur, so I wasn't sent there until I was older. They didn't have a coke machine, but they had a cooler with an intricate maze filled with bottles of soda that were accessible if you put a dime in it. They also had two beautiful, very smart daughters who didn't go to our grade school, but who I met in high school. One of them was a fantastic oboe player. West Grand Market had the advantage of allowing my parents to run a tab that they paid periodically while the others demanded cash.

These were the stores of my childhood that slowly disappeared as the owners got older and bigger stores appeared for a society whose women were starting to have access to cars so they could go farther afield to shop. First there was an Eisner's and later a National, which was so huge we used to view it as almost a sight seeing trip. My mother would buy each of us a whole pint of ice cream if we would sit in the car while she shopped! We took our own long ice teaspoons and feasted on such an unbelievable treat.

It seemed like this part of my life lasted for eons, but in truth we moved there at Thanksgiving when I was five and moved away right after Christmas when I was eleven. 

Those six years defined a lot of who I was.