Shouldn't…but Do

Long ago and far away, well over half a century, there were single stores covering half a city block.

Called department stores, they carried several lines of quality goods,  throughout  multi-level shopping spaces.  Sales staff were knowledgeable, well dressed, courteous.  In the basement, the lunch counter served splendid grilled cheese sandwiches, soup and crackers.  There was even a mirrored wishing pond, filled with goldfish and red-eared sliders, in the day before salmonella warnings.  Gilded, solid, expensive and  secretive, it was a  marvelous world.

At Christmas, the department store came alive.  Festooned with every sort of ribbon, dazzling tree and ornament, who could forget the animated Christmas windows and decorations that spilled out down the street and up the lamp posts?

Arriving early this morning at Target – a discount department store of this age – the glimmer of a Christmas aisle caught my attention, reminding me of those days.

I perused the  inexpensive store decorations, neat aisles of every sort of ribbon, wrap and artificial Christmas tree.  I stood for a long time in front of  lit yard decorations – cheery snowmen, bobbing reindeer.

Nostalgia is a longing for encounters that are no more.  Is it longing?  The good old days are never as good as in memory.  Memory, mother to nostalgia,  is a very choosy recorder of encounter.

Encounter – a meeting – the spirit of the times with a spirit passing through.  Memory takes it in and moves us down the line.  From time to time, if  lucky, we may see  a silvered reflection of that encounter, in the ornaments and tinsel of the present,  that evoke the long ago past.

I bought some wrapping paper I thought was nice,  it says Believe.