What We Have Given Up in Exchange for This Limitless Bounty

Novelty and Nostalgia in Second-Tier Grocery Stores

For five weeks, I’ve been recovering from surgery, sitting at home scrolling endless feeds looking for the next thing to read or watch. Over every feed is a small shadow obscuring something. I eat from the trough forever and am never full. It makes me wonder what we have given up in exchange for this limitless bounty. When I look away long enough, my thoughts cast out for answers in unexpected places.

The closest grocery store to my house is the smallest one in the area but it still boasts an ocean of blacktop parking lot, the walk across which would decimate all but the most veteran Houston-area pedestrians between May and August. The prices are higher than the other stores and the selection is smaller, but I go to it because something about it is vaguely nostalgic. 

It bears the same brand name that the beautiful Korean grocery store^[1] at the end of my parents’ block used to have before it became the Korean grocery store. Today the Korean grocery store has a huge live fish selection and its own food court with multiple restaurants. When I was a child, that same area was home to the grocery store deli, anchored by a single hot food stall that served chicken, mac and cheese, potato salad, green beans, rolls, and a few other homestyle items. Its mirror image on the other side of the grocery store entrance was an independent VHS rental business. 

The restaurants in the Korean grocery are an undeniable upgrade, but the single hot food stall of my childhood grocery store was special to me. It was where my Mom took me for chicken and French Fries when I was twelve, the night after my Dad’s oldest sister came to dinner and asked me how long my parents had been married. I did some mental math and said fourteen years and my aunt laughed and mouthed a question, “you haven’t told him” to my Mom and Dad. And that’s how after seven years of Catholic school I found my Mom explaining to me the six-month difference between their wedding date and my birthday. This is probably why now I feel there’s nowhere quite as intimate as liminal spaces like the sitting areas you find next to grocery store delis: little makeshift rest areas surrounded by necessary but not luxurious activity, little spatial metaphors for life. 

And nobody watches VHS anymore. But they were a huge component of my youth. I understand now that the VHS rental business was a convenient place to dump my sister and me on the way into the store because we couldn’t get lost and wouldn’t bother my parents for every sugary item on the shelves while they shopped. And it was where I went when I had a weird phase^[2] in fifth and sixth grade where every time it would drizzle I’d speed walk up to the corner wearing less of a jacket than I needed so that when I got back to my house with my VHS rental of the Cats musical I would be extra cold and wet so I could bundle up in the darkest room in my house and wait for the song Memory, and I would share a moment across time and space with TS Eliot and Andrew Lloyd Webber and Elaine Page and hundreds of thousands of musical fans. Then I would share that moment again with my wife when we saw Cats on Broadway twenty years later I struggled to explain why the song made me tear up.^[3]

And I still stage a Sisyphean battle to recreate that video rental stall and arrange my life to allow for weird phases like my Cats phase because since I became addicted to feeds it feels like my life is flat and exposure to information is curated. Even though everything is nominally new, hardly anything is novel or exciting. And sometimes it feels like you’ve discovered something eccentric or something cool or something novel but it’s not coincidental or idiosyncratic at all–it’s from a feed that an engineer designed to show you things based on the taste of someone whose taste profile in a database is supposed to resemble your own.

This isn’t all or inherently bad but the cumulative effect is flatness nonetheless. It doesn’t feel like sprinting home with a wet VHS of Cats under your pitiful hoodie, or the time your Dad slipped Winters Tale and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in your suitcase before you left for eight weeks in Latin America, or the time you brought your Mom breakfast in bed for Mother‘s Day and she said she was so happy she wanted to play one of her favorite songs so she played “Love and Affection” by Joan Armitrading. It doesn’t feel like when you’re sharing something, and it’s novel to you at the same time it’s becoming familiar. It’s not the climax to some side story in the narrative of your life.

Another reason I go to the closest grocery store is that even though it’s the smallest and the prices are some of the highest and it doesn’t have the best selection, it’s one of the only ones that always has a security guard posted auspiciously at the only working set of automatic doors. And he looks surly and underqualified and bothered to be there, he never does anything except smile and nod, but this is why I like to see him: because he reminds me of a time before every business was chronically understaffed. Plus, one of the cashiers is an old woman who has to strain to straighten up to five feet and her hair always looks a little wet but she speaks in a sweet, clipped accent that could come from anywhere between the Alps and the Caspian Sea, and she is somehow a consummate professional but one of the sweetest people you’ve ever met and she always calls you, “dear.” You think to yourself, “whose sweet grandmother is this? Why must she work at her advanced age?” But I selfishly hope she lives and works there as long as I live in the neighborhood and keep going to that grocery store, even though she is, bar none, the slowest cashier you might encounter at any of the neighborhood stores. 

I stopped scrolling^[4] sometime ago to reminisce about the childhood VHS rental shop and contemplate these characters at the smaller, worse, more expensive grocery store. But before I put the phone down, I had started to see memes created by people younger than me, completely nonsensical visuals with silly names that have nonetheless become familiar to kids twenty years my junior. My friends and I used to roam the neighborhood and talk about “The Wizard”, an old man with a four-foot beard who biked everywhere all the time. But kids today that age are inside, online, sharing Toilet Men memes^[5]. I wonder if they are recreating the kind of shared intimacy over the strange–the feeling of novelties becoming a familiar part of their world–that has become sterilized as a result of the relentless march of money and technology into our lives over the last twenty years. 

But still, something is missing. And I realize that the small store with the different groceries at not-very-competitive prices is the point. How slow and unusual that interaction with the grandma cashier is—that is really the point. There are faster cashiers and cheaper grocery stores with better selections. But it’s not all about the money. It’s not about what’s convenient. It’s about how these random encounters tempered by kindness remind me who I really am and what life is all about.

Footnotes

1. In what I find an interesting and ironic twist, there is a very popular memoir I have yet to read (but plan to) called Crying in H Mart, “a memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.” I don’t know much about it but do find it kind of funny that the grocery store that was a big part of my childhood was a local off-brand grocery store that closed and was replaced by none other than H Mart. Somewhere in this is a beautiful metaphor about growth and change in America but I have to read the memoir before I make any other pronouncements. 

2. When my wife read the first draft of this, she said I did not belabor the point about how weird my Cats habit was. I grew up in a pedestrian-unfriendly city about half a mile away from this grocery store on a street with no sidewalks. She finds it hilarious and endlessly fascinating the lengths I went to create my own little special atmosphere to watch the movie–getting myself intentionally cold and wet so that I could huddle under a blanket and watch Cats the Musical. It’s even more funny to her because I am not really a huge musical fan. I’ve probably seen less than a dozen total if you don’t count Disney kids’ movies. 

3. I highly recommend you watch the original video of Elaine Page singing Memory. The Barbara Streisand version also nails it. And the Leona Lewis version my wife and I saw on Broadway was good, too.

4. I talk about scrolling and feeds here, but this is not an, “ugh, technology!” essay. I LOVE feeds and the internet, and I love technology. I just wanted to draw into question why what seem like such ordinary and commonplace experiences from my youth seem so rare now. 

5. I am an interloper here. I don’t know young people memes but if you are unfamiliar I highly recommend Googling Skibdi Toilet memes and backstory. This is also not an, “ugh, kids these days!” essay–I find young people's culture interesting, relentlessly resourceful, and pretty much identical to all previous young people's cultures in the ways that matter. 

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Note from Charlie: I’ve been discussing a big upgrade and rebranding of the blog for some time now, but the surgery and delayed recovery have put a bit of a delay on those plans. I wrote the first draft of this one night when I had to be re-hospitalized due to an infection a month after the surgery. It welled up from somewhere deep late at night as I heard the helicopters whirring overhead, delivering urgent cases to the hospital roof. I hope you enjoy it and it takes you back like it did me.