four ninety five

February 23, 2008 | Filed Under ordinary 

in hanna city, illinois there used to be the funkiest store called “meyers’” wherein i could find things that were hanging on the walls thirty years prior, when my mother was there, coin purse in hand, folded down socks around ankles. i used to buy blue envelopes there, a small box at a time, envelopes cut from bits of sky and boxed and placed in a dusty meyers’ corner. when we learned they were closing forever i went and bought all of the blue envelopes and now some are in a stack near the desk and the rest of them, they sit in a dusty corner in our basement, maybe in the attic (?), a giant box full of neat little boxes full of rectangles of sky. i just couldn’t let them be tossed into the trash. ernie understands. in fact, i think it was his $20 that bought them all. the aisles in meyers’ weren’t aisles as much as they were small tunnels in caves made of large tan coveralls, cheap and horribly decorated ceramics, crepe paper damaged by water (marked down in price due to the discoloration the water made, the colors in swollen swirls and concentric cirles, wilted). knitting needles in dangerous piles on the floor, duct tape in all colors, thousands of atrocious shirts shrouded in yellowed plastic on racks in the back, ribbon and cocoa and cigarettes, all for sale if you dared approach the sarcastic and large sweating man with the scary glasses and those greasy strings of hair that hung damp and shiny on his forehead, his glasses, his sideburns.

meyers’ is gone, somewhere there’s something like it, perhaps. in greenville we’ve only wilson’s, (what is with the naming of the last name?) the five and dime store that has nothing in it for five cents, or for a dime. maybe for five dimes there’s something there, buried. wilson’s doesn’t have a sarcastic and sweaty man grunting at us as we pay for things, large fingers bumping too many keys on the cash register. the boys are like me, digging through bin and basket as we do at hole-in-the-wall thrift stores (with which the shining electronic signs and outrageously priced books and dresses and furniture of goodwill industries cannot compete), looking for something long ago forgotten.

this week we took the rainy day with us and went to wilson’s to buy spring cookie cutters (well, we didn’t go there to buy those, but we ended up buying them after all) and some kind of junk store trinket for boys who are good at being a team together. henry got two transformer knock-offs that are called “changeable robots.” he speaks robotically in the voice of the robot to tell us “i-am-Changeable-Robot.” jude got a dinosaur that shoots gumballs into his mouth via its mouth. i searched high and low, over hill and under to find an embroidery hoop (found high, in the back left corner: stretch!) and the miniature clothespins were left behind, somewhere misplaced as we were distractedly wading towards the girl in the front who was staring out the watery window and across the street.

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