Shopping

When we were children, back-to-school was an exciting time for us. We would take last year's uniforms out of storage and try them on to see if they still fit. Then we'd go to St. Francis De Sales church and buy used uniforms, if the old ones couldn't be let out any more. We would walk 8 blocks to Cherokee Street and buy our school supplies at Woolworth’s. Then we would wait.

While my child self is waiting, suspended in the airless void that is memory, let me explain about Cherokee Street. It's a 2 mile long stretch of road along which you can buy practically anything. The eastern third of the street is Antique Row. This meant "county people only" in my book. I used to dream about walking down Antique Row with pocketsfull of hundred dollar bills, buying tiffany lamps and hand woven rugs and solid wood furniture older than my grandmother. I shopped there as an adult, and was sorely disappointed. Most of the shops were nothing more than a high priced flea market. I did find, and buy a glorious shag rug covered in earth tone swirls and paisleys. It is without a doubt, the ugliest rug I've ever seen. It looks like psychedelic vomit that has begun to grow orange fur. My husband collects 70's kitsch, and absolutely loves it.
The Western 2/3rds of Cherokee Street held storefronts of all sizes selling anything from rolling papers to fur coats. There still is a store called Globe Drug. I assume at one time, they had a pharmacy, but they didn't when we shopped there. We bought loose leaf paper with printing errors, folders for a penny apiece and sometimes cheap underwear. Globe Drug was dimly lit, with narrow aisles and narrower shelves. The walls were yellow from decades of tobacco smoke, and everything was factory overstock or flawed, but it was all dirt cheap! Mom taught us how to find bargains amid the mountains of junk, how to check the expiration dates on their boxed food and where to draw the line between bargain and waste of money. It was fine to buy irregular towels or panties, but never irregular shirts or pants. If the price was very good, it might be worth your time to buy it and fix it at home. We didn't own a sewing machine; so all tailoring was done by hand.
We never went into the roller skate shop, or the custom T-shirt store. The Head Shops had beautiful hookahs and bongs, and feathers on alligator clips right in the windows. I wanted a hookah because it was pretty, and my child's mind thought it was for making coffee. I remember pleading with my mom, trying to convince her that she was good enough for that fancy coffee service in the window, and how neat it was that you could pour 2 cups at once. (those being the hoses coming off either side) She would smile, or laugh and say, "I really don't want that kind of coffee service. My percolator makes better coffee anyway." I don't know how she kept from bursting with laughter, but she always did.

When the end of the back-to-school season came, our waiting was done. We would get up at 6 in the morning, eat a good breakfast and take a bus to Cherokee street. Taking the bus signified the specialness of the occasion. It meant our time was too valuable to waste on walking. We'd get off the California bus at Cherokee and walk 3 blocks to the 2 story department store. There would be a small crowd of bargain hunters waiting outside and we would join them, sitting with our butts up against the front doors, staking out our turf. We would sing traveling songs or play word games while we waited the 2 or more hours for the doors to open. In hindsight, we were probably pretty annoying. When the doors finally opened we would rush in, along with all the other eager shoppers. We'd split up, Mom would head for whatever we had overheard our neighbors-in-waiting talking about, since she was biggest. J and I would head for other things. Generally one would go for jeans, one for shirts, and one for work clothes. We'd grab all we could then meet by the cash register and start trading. Having lived this experience for several seasons, I would never want to work on the trading floor of Wall Street. J and I would sit on our stash of clothes and Mom would pull an item from the pile. She'd check the size, and if it didn't fit she'd yell out, "I have a 12! Who's got an 8?!" And the bargaining would begin. Women would become convinced that we had already nabbed the best stuff, and do our fighting for us to get the sizes we needed. My sister and I got stepped on and shoved, but we came away with a few pieces of new clothes for each of us. We always checked for tears before we reached the cash register, and the clothes almost always had dirt and footprints on them, but clothes can wash.