Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 8, 1994 TAG: 9402100004
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: EDWARD R. SPRUELL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
As I walked through the store, I remembered Mom taking us there to buy school supplies; the smell of the new pencils wrapped in clear cellophane; the bright and shiny front of my new Superman lunchbox - the man of steel in yellow and red soaring above the skyline of a tall and distant city, saving humanity from a clear and present evil.
I remembered also the first hamster my parents bought for me there. I named him Fred. He remained stubbornly stuff-jowled with seed, grew fat and lazy, and rarely rode the wheel provided him. Later, I would buy a parakeet there who one solitary afternoon would find his way out of his cage and out the bathroom window to a dreamed-of freedom, no doubt to become a meal for some wilder, wiser predator who had never seen the inside of a pet shop cage, a truer member of the animal kingdom.
I also remembered the Big Chief notebooks my mother bought for us there. They were inch-thick with paper and held the proud profile of an Indian feathered in full headdress on the cover. The paper inside was wide-lined, the kind I and my classmates wrote on with stubby, clenched fists and fat black pencils that the first-grade teacher kept in an old cigar box in her desk drawer back in Georgia where I had moved from.
That night, I saw again the color pictures of lunch-counter food - big, greasy, drippy cheeseburgers and fat, crinkle-cut french fries, the kind of french fries that come in red-and-white baskets that you can find only in bowling alleys now. The kind of french fries that are as bad for you as they can possibly be, as, of course, all french fries have a right to be.
That night, I walked through the same aisles that I walked through as a child, past an old wooden umbrella stand filled with American flags, the type of flags revelers stab in their lawns on the Fourth of July or the kind the color guard plants on a white-crossed grave in Arlington Cemetery up in D.C.; past big-faced "designer watches" of mother of pearl and antique moons for $20 apiece locked deep inside a glass case, the kind you see girls from junior high school wearing at the mall; past rows of store-bought glasses, the kind that hang from old women's necks.
And finally, as the Saturday evening was getting on and "Geronimo" was about to begin at the movie theater, I walked past an old wooden bin filled with artificial flowers - red azaleas and petunias. Flowers you find on graves in what some might regard as the less respectable graveyards, the kind of flowers that never blossom through every season: spring through summer, fall through winter.
As I drove home from "Geronimo" by the Wal-Mart and the Sam's off the pink-lit highway, their acres of aisles, their beeping forklifts, their 100-pound bags of sugar, their cases of canned corn stacked from floor to ceiling, their cold cement floors, I thought of three lone parakeets I saw as I left the store.
They were perched and unaware in a perfect row in a forgotten corner of the store. Unique and individual, each held its own distinct color of green and white and blue. What were they waiting for, I wondered, and who would take them in, I thought, where might they find refuge, a home.
\ Edward R. Spruell of Roanoke is a former instructor of rhetoric and American literature at Clemson University in South Carolina.
by CNB