This morning I wish it was summer and I was 6 again, making one of those trips downtown with mom.   The reason isn’t important, just a trip downtown.  A big deal.   Maybe we’d go first to get a new pair of Red Ball Jets or PF Flyers or Keds for me at Saffords, or maybe a new stiff dark blue pair of Levi’s at Fredendall-Wilkins,   long enough so that the cuffs would have to be turned up a couple inches to give me “growing room”.    Any old errand was fine, as long as it ended with the promise of a trip afterward to the Woolworth store.

FW Woolworth 5 & 10…. “The Dime Store”.

Back in the day when I was growing up, and for decades immediately prior to that, most small towns had these stores and most big cities as well.   In my small Missouri hometown, we had no less than three dime stores.   Scott’s, Mattingly’s, and Woolworth.  I think Scott’s and Mattingly’s were one-of-a-kind business, entirely locally owned and operated, but Woolworth was the undisputed king.  In part because it was located on the prime downtown corner.   The Savings Bank on the opposite corner, Hagan’s men’s store on another , and the courthouse on another,  Woolworth was the epicenter of my downtown world.   Scotts and Mattingly’s were definitely worthy of my shopping loyalty, and got their share of my discretionary spending….  especially Scott’s at Easter when they’d sell little baby chicks dyed blue or pink or green or yellow from a display in their front window, and Mattingly’s on Friday nights when I’d buy a bag of peanuts from under the heat lamp by the cash register, or a bag of chocolate stars to share with my dad.   But somehow Woolworth was the one that captured my imagination the most.   Maybe because in addition to the usual toy fare, they also had a lunch counter.  And a “pet department”…. but I get ahead of my story.   The “Dime Stores” were a central part of small town life.   There were no “big-box”  retailers, no Wal-Mart, no Best Buy, no PetSmart, etc.  In fact, a good case could be made (and has often been made), that the rise of the Wal-Mart stores or others like it on outskirts of small town America  is precisely WHY downtown retail businesses failed and closed in record numbers beginning in the mid-to-late 1960’s.

By the end of the next decade, and certainly by the end of the 1980’s, there were damn few true “Dime Stores” still around in downtown areas anywhere, and those that were still functioning did so almost as a nostalgic throw-back to a “simpler time”.  With the departure of the dime stores, and along with them many other small locally owned specialty retailers …. clothing stores, hardware stores, record shops, bookstores, jewelers, drugstores, cafes, etc……   downtown areas all across our country began to wither and die.

These days when I travel, I am fond of driving on the “blue highways”, staying off the Interstates and Turnpikes, making sure I travel through Main Streets and Courthouse Squares in small towns along my path.  I like to get a “sense of place” in those towns.  What might it have been like years ago?  Is there a Carnegie Library on the edge of town?  Did they have a great old Hardware Store?  Which of these shops USED to be the Dime Store?   In downtown after downtown it is more common than not to see one empty store after another.  Some have been re purposed into law offices, antique malls, tourist attractions, etc.   But precious few have original stores that have been there and part of the fabric of the place for any significant length of time.  Hardware stores sometimes …. sometimes …. survive. But no Dime Stores.  None.

However, back when I was still small enough to be filled with wonder at the idea of a store full of mysterious and sublime toys, hardware, pets and supplies, and miscellaneous mercantile effluvium, the dime store was just THE place.  On those trips to FW Woolworth with mom,   I would start with a quick (or maybe not-so-quick) browse of the toy aisles, and then spend some time looking at the parakeets, hamsters, gerbils, and goldfish in the very back of the store.  The sight, the sound, the smell…. the pet aisle was a true sensory experience.  Any one of them was enough individually to make me want to grab mom’s arm and begin the process of negotiating for a new pet.  Taken together though as a grand display of living, breathing, writhing animal life, I was filled with a momentary and powerful lust to become the master of my own menagerie of critters.  Somehow it never seemed to work.  Mom wasn’t buying.

The one thing that DID sometimes work though, and even today, I’m not really sure why this was the sole exception, was the intense lobbying for one of those little baby turtles.  No sooner had I entered the “turtle aisle” , than I’d be wishing I could get one of those plastic bowls and a little plastic palm-tree to be filled with small rocks and water, where a potential new baby turtle could live out his days in a virtual tropical paradise.  Never mind that those days would be severely limited because I never quite understood that a turtle is not a toy, and sometimes I’d take him out and push him around on the hardwood floor as if he were a 57cent Matchbox car.  Never mind that it was usually a reluctant and lumberingly skittish little car, with the wheels sucked up into the fender wells and its head pulled back inside the engine compartment in abject fear.   Fortunately, I also spent a fair amount of money on ACTUAL Matchbox cars as well, or I may have been personally responsible for the demise of far more turtles than those sorry few who were unfortunate enough to come home with me.

Yes, the FW Woolworth store was a magical place.  A place where a couple years later, about age 8 or 9,  I’d take some of the money I’d saved up and go peer into the display case in the aisle where they kept the cheap jewelry …. “ruby” and “sapphire” and “diamond” rings, “gold” necklaces and earrings.  Where, in what seemed like a perfectly sound plan, I’d make a quick decision to screw up my courage and actually BUY one of those rings.  One with a big red stone.  One that I would take to school to give to THAT girl.  Yes, I think I knew she didn’t really fancy me all that much. I was actually pretty SURE she didn’t fancy me all that much.  But she was all I could think of.  And she was always pleasant and smiled at me in those few face-to-face encounters we would have in class, in the lunchroom, in the library, etc.    Now, armed with that ring as proof of my everlasting and undying love, how could she possibly do anything other than swoon and swear her undying love and affection for me?    So  I’d take that ring to Eugene Field the next day after purchasing it, tucked securely into my jeans pocket …. not the big front pocket, but the little side pocket .. .the one for which its purpose was never clear ….  but yet was perfect for the safety of treasures such as these.   For the next several days, ring at the ready, I’d be ever vigilant,  looking for just the right moment to whip it out and present it to THAT girl.  It was  just a formality really.  The final step in a flawless plan.   We were headed toward the blissful joy of being “a couple”.   It had to be.

Then, one day a few days after buying the ring …. on the playground, in a moment of serendipity as I was coming off the big slide… not the little slide (you know, for the little kids), not the middle slide (for normal fun-loving folks), but the BIG slide, the SCARY slide, the DANGEROUS slide …. I realized as got to the bottom, stood up and caught my balance, she was right there in front of me, momentarily and unexpectedly all alone.

Standing right there, by the kickball court.

Ah …. the kickball court.  What more perfect setting to become forever etched in our memory as “The Place” … the place where our true love began?    So I screwed up my courage went right up to her and took the ring out of my pocket with a flourish.  I thrust it, ruby forward, towards her.  I stammered something about wanting her to be my girlfriend.

In a moment far too familiar to nerdy kids everywhere, this little girl who had filled my dreams and who made my heart beat just a little bit faster, a moment that truly was just a moment though it seemed to play out over the course of days and days, looked at me with a slight look of terror and said, “Ummm, no thanks.”  Then she turned and ran off.

“No thanks.”

Had I heard right?   Maybe I hadn’t been completely clear?    But there she was, running off to find her friends, to confide in them how she had a “close encounter of the worst kind” with that skinny kid with the bad haircut and cowlick, who wiped white paste on the shoulders of his dark shirts, who was the slowest of the slow at “board races” in arithmetic, how he actually had the NERVE to offer her a RING!!.  They all  giggled to themselves and turned to look at me and giggle some more and shake their heads in disbelief.

Whispering to one another things that I could only imagine, but that I’m pretty sure weren’t about what a fabulous catch I’d be and maybe she should reconsider.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I don’t want to imply that my psyche was irreparably damaged by this incident.  I didn’t slink off, humiliated, with a resolve to never love again.  I didn’t lose my faith in humanity, become a shy and withdrawn wallflower, or start a downward spiral that would lead me to a life of drug and alcohol dependence and horrible misogyny.

But on the other hand, I’m not sure I ever approached a girl again with such pure and innocent bravado either.  With the confident certainty that she would like me as much as I liked her, and the surety (in the moment) that our being together was destined from the beginning of time.

Rejection in love at eight isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a kid. But on the other hand, try telling that to an eight year old.  Try telling that to him at the precise moment when what SHOULD have been the glorious culmination of a brilliant plan flawlessly executed, instead turns to tragic and unforeseen humiliation.  Try telling him that as that cheap red ring that had seemed like the central piece in such a brilliant plan while standing in front of the glass case in FW Woolworth suddenly begins to seem like such a really, really bad idea.  Such a bad idea in fact, that he would take it home and hide it way in the very back of a dresser drawer.  In the back of a dresser drawer where it was mostly out of sight and mind. But where from time to time for years and years, he would…. I would …. accidentally see it back there and then just as surely see that look of terror in her eyes all over again.   “No thanks”.

Life is complicated for an 8-year old.

But back at 6… which is a much simpler age, after all…. after my turtle gazing, I’d go find mom wherever she was browsing in the back part of the FW Woolworth store.   This was the part of the store into which  I never ventured.  I never went there because they simply didn’t have anything at all of interest there. As far as I could tell, all they sold in that part of the store were just lampshades and ironing boards and curtain rods and wooden clothes-pins (two kinds). 

Then mom and I would go sit at the lunch counter.  The lunch counter ALWAYS made me feel better.   She would help me to hop up on the bright red vinyl stool,  and she’d buy me a cherry Coke and fries and an unnaturally red hot dog from that contraption with the spikes that rotated to keep the hot dogs warm under a high wattage light bulb until they were almost more brown than red, and shriveled almost but not quite beyond recognition.

Because sometimes, even though at six I was not yet privy to all the the hard lessons I would learn at eight, a shriveled weenie from the Dime Store is just what you need.

Sometimes.

John