The Isolation Journals - Day 41

Today's prompt is about brick and mortar stores.  The timing is just right, as I'm about to venture out to Target, which feels like a big deal.  It will be my first trip to an establishment that isn't a grocery or liquor store in my immediate neighborhood, in 2 months.  I don't love big box stores, and going to Target is usually just another chore, but damn I'm excited.  I don't know what I expect to find there.  I have a feeling my shopping list is going to turn out like a kid writing to Santa and asking for a pony and a house with a built-in water slide and a dad who isn't a garbage monster.

Santa, I just want some reasonable toilet paper and cleaning wipes.  I'm not gonna lie, I haven't been a good girl this year, but I'll make it up to you in 2021, promise. 

Update:  I started composing this post before my shopping trip, but now I'm back, and here is the haul, y'all:

I don't remember signing over my first born child to Santa, or his anagrammatic buddy Satan, but if I did, joke's on whomever because this uterus is out of service.  Unless Satan wants Charlie.  He can have that mess.

The prompt is from Sarah Dajani, a one-time pastry chef who now works in the food marketing world.

Prompt:  Think of a brick-and-mortar store that you love. It could be a place you go all the time, or at least you did pre-pandemic. It could be a favorite shop from childhood—a place where you went to buy sodas and candies or to eye things way beyond what you could afford on your allowance. Write about what you saw, smelled, tasted, purchased—or didn’t. Write about the first time you visited, or the last one, or anytime in between.
 
As a bonus: If that store is still around, do something to help it stay in business or to lift their morale.

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Brick and Mortar

I could rhapsodize about some small, independent business with a sophisticated aesthetic and cult following.  I don't not appreciate plenty of establishments like that.  I know I can be a snob.  And yet, there's something to be said for remembering your roots.  There's no place like home, and when I think of home, after family and friends, one of my strongest associations will always and forever be Wawa.

Wawa, the mythic convenience store chain of the greater-Philadelphia region.

Come for the fee-free ATMs, stay for the coffee.  Why not order a hoagie, or grab one of those curiously-textured soft pretzels that smell like carb heaven but taste like the yeasted embodiment of Thomas Wolfe's truism, "You can't go home again."  They are always striving towards the idea of a pretzel, but never quite hit the mark.  I love them all the more for that.

And if you should be so lucky as to visit a Super Wawa with gas pumps in New Jersey, allow yourself to utter the four most luxurious words in the English language.  "Fill it with regular."  You might be thinking, hey, shouldn't it be five words?  What about a 'please?'  But bitch, please, it's New Jersey.

I sadly haven't lived within a half day's drive of a Wawa in 10 years, but I still get my fix on an annual basis.  Often when I visit home, I'll fly into the Philly airport.  If my mom doesn't pick me up with a piping hot 12 oz. of 2/3 black coffee, 1/3 Mocha Alert cappuccino waiting in the cupholder, you better believe the Wawa is our first stop.

Growing up in our small South Jersey town surrounded by farm fields, there weren't a lot of recreational options for the kids who weren't rich, hot, or curious about illicit substances.  Even once we could drive, the choices were still limited.  Friday night at the mall, where we'd likely get kicked out for one harmless but idiotic reason or another.  Hang out in a basement.  Or hang out in a Wawa parking lot.  There was a certain allure to all three choices, and they weren't mutually exclusive, but the Wawa parking lot was where the action was at.  As long as somebody had $.50 to spend on a pretzel, hey, we weren't loitering, we were customers.

Any day trip to the shore began and probably ended with a pit stop at Wawa.  First for iced coffee, hoagies, and chips.  Then a sandy pee-stop after a blissful day spent dodging sunburns, seagulls, and the beach tag patrol.

Wawa was so marvelously ubiquitous and so deeply ingrained in our internal compasses that once, before smart phones and GPS, we staged a Wawa Derby.  Two cars, two hours.  Whichever car could hit more Wawas, from memory, was the winner.  A purchase had to be made at each location, and photographic evidence was required.  I don't remember which team won, but really, we were all winners that night.

Many others fetishize Wawa as I do, but there are those who claim it is objectively not great.  Those people are wrong.  They may be simply bad people, or perhaps they claim a geographically-based allegiance to an inferior chain like Sheetz, QuickChek, or Royal Farms.  To them, I can only hope they will one day pull back the veil of ignorance and have a change of heart.  For, if I may so rudely misappropriate the wise words of the great Maya Angelou, they are doing the best they can because they don't know better.  But if they knew better, they'd do better.