At Long Last – Shopping!

The monastery had a fairly full guest house for the week between Christmas and New Year. We usually close every Sunday evening to have a community day off on Monday, but between Christmas and New Year we’re open and it is wonderful, mostly, with old friends and some folks who are happy to be with us for some or all of that time. I certainly remember plenty of lonely times around Christmas and New Year when I was a parish priest and understand how nice it is to have a community to spend the holidays with.

We bade a fond farewell to the last of the guests on New Year’s Day after Vespers, which we moved up to 3pm, and then more or less collapsed into a time of rest and silence. Which has been wonderful.

Much of yesterday I was working in the Library. We have lots and lots of neat books that have been crying out to be cataloged, and since to me working in a library is next thing to blissful sandbox play time, I let myself play in the Library. It was great. Then today I had a piece of work I had been putting off for some time, which in the way of such things seemed to grow more daunting the more I put it off. But in fact I got through it in about 3 hours this morning, and then decided, I need to get out and do something.

I got in the car and drove toward Kingston. I had a pretty good hamburger (actually, a bacon cheeseburger) at the pretty good Port Ewen Diner, and then headed off to the mall, where I purposed to look at carry-on luggage at Target and see a movie.

Once there, the parking lot was pretty full. I was trying to park near the door near the movie section, and couldn’t get a place there, so I had to settle for something further out in the tundra, near the entrance to Macy’s. I went in and walked to the cinema section and checked the showing times for Doubt, and then headed for Target. Which was, of course, at the exact opposite end of the mall.

I must make a confession. I am a terrible shopper. If there are more than 2 things I have purposed to check out, unless I write them down, I will forget half of them and remember them on the way home. I get into a store and I clutch. I get all Consumer Report-ish about things, obsessing about things I really don’t care about. And, once I found the luggage in Target, which was of course at the exact other end of that very large store, I got all geeky and started to obsess about zippers and compartments and wondering if this one with the computer pocket in the front was better than that one with the computer pocket in the back, and so forth. This went on for some time, until I woke up and realized, I don’t want any of these suitcases. They’re far too small, once I pack my habit and enough clothes and other stuff to get me through a week or so. What was I thinking? A carry-on? Me? Get real.

I got real and sauntered out of the store. Now when I was young, and this is still true in some stores in Manhattan, if you come in, you came in to buy, so one prepares one’s face and a conversation in case the salesperson stops you with The Look, and you have to justify yourself, leaving empty handed. A sort of fraud. Under judgment. So I reflexively prepared myself, but of course, no-one really cares if you leave Target without buying something. And anyway, “No, I was just looking”, sounds faintly ridiculous in that context.

I started walking back to the cinemas, and wandered into Best Buy. I’m more comfortable in the computer and audio-video commercial environment, but as I looked around, I realized something I had noticed subconsciously already in Target. There were lots of people looking, and not very many people buying. And the ones buying were looking at the pricier items and then getting a little black case or a dvd or something. As I wandered back to the cinema, my lengthy hike gave me time to notice the people more carefully. Lots of young people, not really shopping, but just being young together. And also lots of older people not really shopping either. In fact, much of the population of the mall was people like me who were really not shopping, but just there for a while.

This is so different from Manhattan. There basically the whole island is one form of shopping or another. But there are a lot of other things as well, and the arteries that move you from shop to shop also move people to work and home and hospitals and schools and churches and all the other activities of life. Commerce is just one element, and the social life is natural. Well, the social life in the mall is natural as well, except that the environment is entirely commercial.

There are a lot of cheap shots one can take at malls, and maybe it is true that they are dinosaurs about to morph into something else, what with internet shopping on Amazon and so forth. But here were lots of people doing what they had learned to do over a couple of generations – they wanted to be out, in public, with other people, and this is the space that’s available to them. That's sweet, I think.

So I relaxed and decided to let my inner mall child out. I enjoyed the movie too. And – a monastic victory of sorts – the only things I bought today were a hamburger at that pretty old fashioned diner, and a (senior priced) ticket to Doubt.

Happy New Year.