Month: May 2009

In case you didn’t know, San Francisco hosts two Fleet Weeks a year. One for the United States Navy, complete with the Blue Angels and such, and one for the Imperial Navy…

I pay good money to avoid this kind of temperature. You know it’s hot because the direct sunlight is searing, but there’s fog over the western mountains (clearly visible from in front of the hospital today). Unfortunately the cloud cover and occasional rain means it is also abnormally muggy for this place and time of year, and I got enough of that in the old country.

Speaking of the old country, on top of the trip this weekend, one of my best friends ever is on Pastebook now, where apparently a good chunk of my high school has reunited. Jury’s still out on this. Coming all slam-bang at once, it makes for quite the temporal fugue, aggravated by the fact that it’s twenty years since the Big Spring – let’s see, by this time 20 years ago, I think we were through most of the big travel and I had the fourth ace in my hat (district, county, regional, and finally state championship) but prom had not yet happened, which meant that things were still more or less normal between me and my common-law girlfriend. (Long story.) Trying real hard not to think about how most of the kids I see on campus were not born yet by then.

It’s a weird thing for me because I didn’t exactly part on the best of terms with my high school. Most of my friends – certainly my two best ones – were a year ahead of me, and I didn’t quite get on with my fellow seniors (to the point where six weeks into my senior year, I was dating a pageant girl from a much more rural high school). In fact, I was kind of a headcase – I wasn’t the Terrell Owens of Scholar’s Bowl, but you wouldn’t want to live on the difference. At least I wasn’t a cancer on the team. Much. (My insistence on keeping score in practice as me vs. everyone else might have been a detriment to team unity.) And of course, everyone went to college, and most folks at least got out of town – I ended up closer to my house in college than I was in high school. I think the souring experience of undergrad more or less permanently put me off the old home patch, which meant that I never really got into the alumni circles after my closest fellows left town for good themselves.

And yet…all in all, it was a good time. I had a much more collegiate experience from high school than I ever got from undergrad – hell, I was wearing my high school ring on the day I was married and I will claim RLC ’til the day I die in the same way that I won’t even acknowledge where my BA came from. I lived hell and gone from everyone, and my social circles might not have been as broad or numerous as others, and a lot of it had to be done over the phone, but fuck it – I was a starter on the closest thing we had to a flagship varsity team, I took at least half a dozen out of town trips competing in one thing or another, we had Led Zep and the Who and damn near a secret handshake in “Magic Bus”, and I drank Dr Pepper a 3-liter at a time and stuck cards in my hat like a fighter pilot’s kills and opened class with TWO verses of “Jeremiah Was A Bullfrog” daily and bribed the German teacher with lunch if he’d let us skive off class to go to the Bangkok House for curry and covered lockers in Post-It notes, and it may not have been perfect, but I can look back at high school and say in confidence that I was cheated out of nothing. There’s a black-hole void in my life, sure, but it’s nothing to do with the mustard-ugly blockhouse on the back side of Red Mountain.

So I was in the old country over the long weekend (well, long for me, and it sure as hell felt long after my flight – but that’s another story). I was walking around what, at the time, was the mall of malls, the Death Star of competitive commerce, the Riverchase Galleria. In 1989, it was the undisputed champion: every major regional department store, plus Macy’s (Macy’s! In Alabama!) and all sorts of intriguing stores for a high-school kid to lose himself in. In a world with no pubs, no clubs, no apartments and no girlfriend, this is where the action was.

Two decades later, the Macy’s is completely empty. Another store has become Macy’s through buyout – in fact, buyouts mean that there are three anchors stores worth of Belk’s while names like Rich’s, Pizits/McRaes, Yielding’s, Parisian – PARISIAN, for Godsakes, the place where a cute salesgirl first demonstrated that even the surliest of nerds can be conned into splashing out on fashion-forward apparel with enough eyelash flutters – are all long gone. There are a ridiculous number of empty storefronts, and almost as many filled by some local hole-in-the-wall store or fly-by-night modeling agency rather than a national retail chain. No record stores. No bookstores – well, no general-interest bookstores, and only one or two of the religious variety. No candy store, no toy store, and even the food court has empty berths where the Taco Bell used to be.

Part of it is because of the Summit, certainly. Up I-459 at the US 280 intersection lies an outdoor shopping center that has all the most yuppie-tastic stuff, the place where I would probably be doing my shopping had I remained in the old country. Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma, Cheesecake Factory, Saks, an Apple Store – everything you need for the frustrated mid-level HR drone with his ex-sorority wife living out his days in quiet desperation and wishing like hell he’d taken a chance on a life outside the South when it was offered. Now, why in the hell you would set up an outdoor shopping mecca in a place with 100-degree heat, 90% humidity, air quality in the unhealthy range all summer, regular afternoon thunderstorms from May to September, and REGULAR TORNADO SIGHTINGS? I’m sure that some donk looked at the Grove, or Santana Row, and said “we can do that!” without thinking about the difference between California and Alabama.

But a sagging economy is not going to be good to a mall on the downside. Nordstrom has cancelled their Alabama expansion, which would have put a store in the Galleria in 2012 and given them a huge boost. Century Plaza, on the east side of town, is circling the drain. Eastwood Mall, one of the first enclosed malls in the country, is bulldozed to make way for – of course – a Wal-Mart Supercenter. Only the tiny Brookwood Village, now Colonial Brookwood Village, hangs on – and it’s been completely remodeled to take on some “lifestyle center” aspects and has the fortune to sit next to the most affluent zip code in the state.

Recessions hit Alabama earlier, harder, and for longer than most places. And their main effect is to weed out the middle. The “beautiful ones” hang on just fine, drive their Lexus SUVs with Birmingham-Southern College stickers to Whole Foods, and everyone else shuffles down to Wal-Mart. Meantime, the place where everyone used to go sits there on the slippery slope, because there’s not that much in the middle anymore.

However, it is oddly comforting to know that Bama Fever is still selling a crimson silk robe with houndstooth lining and a big script A on the front. Horrifying, but comforting.