Anyway, visiting the store was about as nostalgic an experience as I've ever had. When I was little I used to go to Price Club with my mom, and it was a huge adventure. The store was sublimely big, almost a city, or maybe even a civilization, within a building. To this day I don't think we ever reached the outer regions of the structure.
On really special occasions, my mom would get one of those flat cart-palate things, and my sister and I would get to ride on it. We always asked to do this, but only rarely were allowed. Sometimes we climbed through the products — probably to our mom's embarrassment, but to our own delight. (I saw some kids doing this tonight and felt like Holden Caulfield. Stay in the boxes kids, I wanted to say, it doesn't get better than that.)
In any case, there was always a wealth of free samples, unexplored corridors, and mysterious products filled with the allure of the unknown.
In short, and like the world itself, as a child Costco was filled with wonder, promise and possibility.
Before tonight I hadn't been to Costco in years, and as an adult it was considerably less exciting (I could see the walls, for example, destroying the illusion of an endless landscape of products.) Still, the store smelled the same way that it used to — sort of like a clean warehouse filled with packaging materials. There were also products I haven't seen since my childhood, and consequently associate with that period. Things like family sized boxes of fruit rollups and granola bars, huge packages of cleaning supplies and toiletries. Ice cream sandwiches. Kirkland products. Some things even brought back specific memories, like the dog food and the golden retriever my family had when I was five, or the double boxes of milk and the structures we built out of those same boxes.
Like I said, I don't plan to get a membership to Costco. It's sort of a nightmare as an adult. But occasionally, when I got a whiff of the bakery or the book section, that nightmare turned into a dream.
Jim - mixing it up with a little nostalgia, ha. Was definitely not expecting you to express warm fuzzy feelings about Costco. But it was nice, cause I remember those days too.
ReplyDeleteI remember one time I was running once in a Price Club parking lot at night and didn't see a chain they had set up as a cart corral. Wind knocked out, lying on the ground, concentric rings emanating from the sodium lights as I lay on my back, looking up at the night sky, desperate for oxygen. The post-priceclub euphoria that had so recently been coursing through my veins now as foreign and elusive as the air for which I vainly fought.