Of course, the built reality is a mall in sheep's clothing; one look at the names of the tenants tells you that it's a mall. You can buy fancy clothes in a chain department store, browse books in a chain store and eat in a chain restaurant. But you can't buy an envelope or stamps, food for supper, or an aspirin for your head that is now throbbing from the assault on your senses that is mall shopping. And you have to constantly climb back into your car.
Consider, if you will, yesterday's shopping list: I needed a book of stamps, two maps (for the weekend's road trip), maple syrup, lentils, turmeric, soy milk and rice noodles, candied fruit and yeast (think hot cross buns for Easter morning), chocolate eggs, and wintergreen to keep the village strays from using my flower beds as a litter box.
At home, I could have looked in the national chain bookstores for the maps (you know which two), and there is a supermarket for the foods and a drugstore (local, but still chains) that should have the wintergreen. Chocolate eggs would have been available at either, no doubt, but they are far away from the "town center" and set back from the road by the ubiquitous immense parking lot (which is never full, indeed, usually less than a quarter full), which means I need to drive there--over speed bumps on an empty four-lane road. For stamps, I would have had to load the kidlet in the car yet again, cross the railroad tracks, and head to the real downtown post office.
But I'm in rural Ireland, in a town that reminds me forcibly of one of Lake Wobegon's fictitious stores, Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, whose slogan is, "if you can't get it at Ralph's, you can probably get along without it." Likewise, if you can't get it in here, you can probably do without: if they don't have it, chances are they'll have to order it, usually from the UK. It makes you think twice before buying something.
I start by parking the car along the chaotic street. At first glance, it's a traffic engineer's nightmare: the major arterial (two lanes!) from Dublin doubles as the main street, which means traffic can be heavy in the morning (folks heading up to the city), in the evening (coming back down), and when the afternoon buses arrive (2:15, 3:15, 5:10), dropping kids who go to school up in Dublin. Traffic is slowed additionally by the fact that cars park head-in along both sides of the wide street, and need to back out. You'd think no one would ever get out of the parking spots, but they do, and quite easily. You see, since that's how every one parks, they understand that niceness is the only way the system will work. And besides, with only a few spots free at peak times, people may want your spot, and are happy to hold up traffic for you. Speed bumps are unnecessary, traffic calming is built in.
Little One and I head down Main Street, past the pub, the betting office, the pizza place (Mommy, see the dough rising?) the church, the florist, the bank, the butcher, and the video store and duck into the office shop cum post office. There are a few folks in the line, but that gives us a chance to read the bulletin board. Puppies and a car for sale, a new treatment room at the health food store, and vegetable garden allotments available at Hunting Brook. We buy our book of stamps, and have a look at the map rack, but it doesn't have what we want.
So, we head back up the street. The church is quiet, but the doors of the betting office and pub are open to the lovely warm day, and we can hear the conversation and horse races inside. The bread is out of the pizza ovens, cooling in the window. It smells lovely. The fellow from the print shop where we got the apple juice labels done greets us on his way into the pharmacy.
We cross the street and duck into the bookshop. The lady has the same sniffles as me, and we commiserate. She digs around in the map rack with me, and we find #61 (which I've been looking for all over Dublin), and gets on the computer to order the others. She takes my mobile number, and promises to send an SMS when they come in in a few days. She sticks the yellow note on the wall next to the till.
Two doors down (skipping the beauty shop), we duck into the health food store. The shopkeeper saw us on the other side of the street and has already brought the case of milk I ordered out, and ducks into the back room for the noodles while I take the last tomatoes and scour the shelves for the other items. Turmeric proves elusive, but I'll try across the street. We--that's everyone in the shop-- have a chat about the best way to keep cats out of the garden, and how lovely wintergreen smells, and no, they don't have any, but McGreal's across the way might.
We pop our groceries in the car and pop down to the pharmacy--sure enough, they have the wintergreen in a spray can. We have ice cream in the car (our veg box had rhubarb in it, which screams to be made into cobbler, which needs ice cream). We duck into Kenny's SuperValu, where the butcher sharpening his long knife greets us coming in. We get the makings of an Irish breakfast from him, peek to see if there are any white eggs for dyeing (nope!), and find the turmeric in the spice rack. With that, we have everything on our list, and an ice cream cone goes into the cart as a reward to a patient little boy.
Happily licking his cone, we head to the car. The church tower clock tells me it's already 5:15: all that chatting and walking does take time, or rather makes the time pass pleasantly, and it's clear that we can't possibly get the chicken cooked tonight. The funny thing is, I don't feel tired and stressed, as I usually do after a couple of hours shopping in the States.
So we beeline to Pizza 2000 (hey, that's the year it opened, and the cheesy name stuck), where we order up three pies (margherita, apollo, quatro staggioni) and chat with the lady making them. As I stand there reading the board, she reminds me of what Number One son ordered last time he was in--she remembers better than I do!
I think a town like ours is what that California developer may have had in mind, except he or she forgot that making something look like a town center on paper does not make it one. Little One looked at the title over my shoulder as I wrote this morning and said, "which shopping center?" I asked him if he thought our town was a shopping center, and after a short think, he responded, "no, because people live there."
