In about 1967, the Summer Of Love elsewhere, we moved to a leafy city block in a new town. I was 11 and always barefoot, even when running down the gravel alley to the little grocery on the corner. I was proud of my calloused soles. I could sprint that sharp, white, hot gravel all the way to Pack’s Market.
Mr. And Mrs. Pack must not have needed city permits to open their little store on the corner. It sat among houses, no other businesses close by. A step or two up from the concrete sidewalk and you were opening the door with a tinkle of the tiny bell. They needed a bell to bring them from their work in the back room because they were the only clerks, as well as owners. They lived above their store.
The entire building couldn’t have been much larger than the houses in our neighborhood, so it was only a couple aisles wide. A little meat and cheese counter in the back.
If you ever watch an old Western and see a scene inside a little store, the front counter will be lined with huge glass jars stocked with various candy. That was the Pack’s counter.
Way, way in the back there were stacks of glass pop bottles. In those days pop bottles (in West Virginia we said “pop” for any kind of soda) – pop bottles were recycled by the pop companies, so you could roam the alleys and collect empty bottles and redeem them for a nickel each. And we’d buy candy from the glass jars.
The inside of Pack’s Market felt old. The floors were dark boards, but not stained fake dark like your floors are now, but dark from decades of bare feet and clean mops smelling of pine. And the lights were not those long white metal fixtures that, when I was older, would throw cold glares onto the metal surfaces of new “everything” stores, the ones that would drive Pack’s Markets out of business. No, the lights were light bulbs, like at home.
I was 11. I had never had my own store. It seemed a part of paradise to finally have my block, my alley, my clubhouse, and my store. You smirk, but notice how even in your sophisticate middle age you like to have a grocery store you habitually go to – your store. And no, it’s not just because you get familiar with the layout. It’s not just an efficiency thing, though that matters. You somehow feel like your store is a part of the furniture of your life, that collection of curios to which you’ve given your fondness. That uniquely mean you. You probably have an address.
When your store is on your block, and so you can walk to it, you live in a town. You can have a store in the country but it’s too far away to walk to, so you’re a country boy. Country boys go to the store, too, but they go in the back of the pickup truck, once a week when the checks come in, not every day like town boys can. Well, I had a store. I was a town boy, for the first time in my life. Which meant I had a town and a town had me.
There’s nothing wrong with being a country boy, mind you. All my cousins were country boys, and we loved to visit them and ride their ponies and watch them snap black snakes like whips. But we had moved so many times, and lived in so many houses that were on the edge of the country or the edge of a town, I had never been really either a country boy or a town boy. I didn’t know what a “block” was. We didn’t have a pickup truck.
I belabor this, I know, but it’s important to be somewhere on someone’s map. If you’re a country boy, you’re not lost because you’re on your own map, made up of a creek and trails and fences, within running distance, and there’s no town grid to get in the way. Your map fades out near the top of the ridge and over in the other holler. But a town boy is also on a map, usually gridded by some clerk a century ago, but filled in by how far he can run past the block numbers, up or down, and his map fades out in the territory of another neighborhood store. (I wouldn’t have used the word “neighborhood” then.).
Now I had a town (“Kenova”), and I lived on a block with a name (“Pine Street”), and that block was anchored by a store (Pack’s Store”). I could know my address – “1809 Pine Street”. As I write this, more than 50 years later, that’s the first address I can remember, though I could probably name for you a dozen houses we had lived in before I turned that 11 that summer. But I couldn’t name them by an address.
If you go back there today, there’s no hint of Pack’s Market. It was torn down, and a new shiny house built in its place. The people who live in that house, today, have no idea that about where they sit at a dinner table, centered on their map, Mrs. Pack used to reach across the counter to me, smiling over her glasses, and drop nickels into my dirty palm.