A Day At Gimbels, Long Ago

     One day when I was about 12 or 13, my mother and I went to Gimbels in Philadelphia. I don’t remember the occasion, but I think it was around the Easter season, probably to buy me some clothes. There are several things about that day that boggle my mind when I think back to it.  

     The first is that we had lunch at Horn and Hardarts, which was a fascinating experience for a small town kid. Horn and Hardarts, for those of you who are not familiar with it, was a self-serve type of restaurant, where you chose what you wanted to eat from behind a series of glass compartments. Could be a sandwich or pie or any number of other lunch-type food. I certainly don’t remember what I had, but it was a kind of a forerunner to choosing your food at a WAWA, except that it was already made and there were no such things as a computer from which to make your selection.

     The second thing was that my mother somehow got us there. Thinking of her in her later days with her anxiety and confusion states of mind, it is an amazing reality to think that she was once young and quite able to make such a thing happen. I believe we must have gone into Camden and taken the train across the Ben Franklin Bridge into center city. As best as I can recall, she was not the slightest bit intimidated by how to make it happen.

      The third thing were the wooden escalators with their clickety-clack sounds taking you up to the second or third floors and beyond. Talk about stepping back in time, they still stand out in my mind as something that smacks of earlier days before I was born—like the days I would have witnessed in old-time movies of Charlie Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy at the Saturday matinees in Medford movies.

     Then, the fourth and final thing of that day, was futuristic. We waited in line to enter a room that had one of the first colored televisions on display. I can still recall the excitement I felt, since at the time, such a thing seemed like a fantasy world. As little by little, step by step, we got closer, my anticipation grew, imagining the color being as vivid as on the screen of a movie theater. But then, once we were inside, great disappointment set in—not much reward for waiting in line for such a long time. At best, the picture on the TV could only be described as faintly tinted in pale reds and greens. We exited the room shaking our heads and saying, “Well, that certainly wasn’t worth it. We don’t need to get one of those.”

     Now all of this probably sounds pretty incidental to you. And, it is of course. It makes me wonder, though. My mother lived to her mid-eighties and, by then, she had her bouts with anxiety and confusion, so it’s interesting to remember that, at one time, she was young and able to do things that, while not necessarily big and adventuresome, were nonetheless of a very competent and independent nature. 

     It’s good to consider the fact that a lot of elderly people we see everyday who seem to be struggling to make sense of life and seem helpless to function within the ordinary day-to-day world, were once young and alert and very able to keep pace with life.

     Or maybe I’m just thinking about that since in February I turn 81.