I’m not going to tell you right at the beginning. I want you to follow this random train of thought that got me to this second entry onto the list of things my secretary doesn’t know. I have no confirmation that she doesn’t know this, but I’m pretty confident that I’m right.
So here’s where it started…the other day I was driving home from the store and a small little group of birds flew really low across the street and I was afraid one flew under my car and I might have hit it. That made me think way back to the time when I had just gotten my driver’s license. I told my parents I had hit a bird on the way to the store. I didn’t really. But I told them that I did so I would have an excuse to go out to my car with a towel and bend down to look at the front fender. I wasn’t going out to look for a dead bird, I was taking the towel to discreetly rub off the white paint that was on the fender of my black car. The white paint got there because I failed at whipping my car around to pull into a parking space that was facing the opposite direction of the parking lot lane I was in. I had seen my mom do it before and thought I could. To be fair, I did do it. I just scraped the front of my car down the side of the white car in the space next to the one I was trying to get in. I went in that store, bought what I needed, and left as fast as I could and with my heart racing, hoping against hope that I got out of there before the owner of the white car did. I was successful in that at least. I was also successful in scraping the white paint off so my parents never knew what I had done.
Thinking about that then made me remember that my parking lot mishap took place at a Food Lion grocery store. That store was in the same shopping center as a Walmart.
And that’s when I realized…does my secretary know that Walmart stores didn’t always sell groceries? Has she lived her whole life knowing that Walmart sold everything? Or does she have a vague memory of a time when you went to Walmart for certain things and then made a separate trip to an actual grocery store to get the food items you needed? At least the refrigerated ones anyway. And for that matter, does she know that Kmart was Walmart’s competition?
The trajectory of my life was altered because of Kmart. Back in my day, Kmart was a big deal. Blue light special anyone? Both of my parents were managers at separate Kmart stores in Georgia. My mom was the personnel manager and my dad was the loss prevention manager. Loss prevention, by the way, was the title for security. He and his staff watched the cameras and caught people shoplifting. Back then they could actually stop the people when they walked out of the store without paying. Apparently, now people just walk out. I get it, liability and safety of the other customers, and all of that. But obviously, back then things were different.
Around the time that I was 10 or 11, Super Kmarts were just beginning to be a thing. It was a pretty revolutionary idea… a Kmart store…that sold groceries. Absolutely a ‘one stop shop’. Those Super K’s were popping up all over and we moved to North Carolina so that my dad could become the loss prevention manager of one up here. He also considered Charleston, S.C. and Valdosta, G.A..
We moved to North Carolina just before I started the 7th grade. I think I was 12 at the time. My mom became the personnel manager at a different Super K, just as new, a couple cities from the store where my dad was to work. I sometimes wonder how my life would have turned out had we not moved here. I certainly wouldn’t have met my husband. At least, not this one. I’m sure I would have grown up and married someone from Georgia, but I’m grateful to have the one I do now.
It’s kind of sad now though. Kmart was such a big part of my life and now I don’t know where there still exists a Kmart store. If there is one, I don’t think it’s a Super K. In fact, what breaks my heart even more is that the very store that my dad moved us here to work in, is now a complex of shopping centers that has a Hobby Lobby and a Kohl’s and other smaller stores. The Outback Steakhouse is still there across the parking lot though. We ate there many times.
And with all of that, my secretary probably knows nothing about any of it. I’m not sad about that though. It’s not her fault. She can’t have knowledge of something if it didn’t exist in her lifetime. That’s just how it goes. Life goes on, time moves forward, and people get older leaving plenty of opportunities to say, “Back in my day…”
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