In fear of where I am going…the mall, on black Friday…trembling even to admit for myself the impetus of this adventure, then as if to reassure me, the ghost of Thoreau said, “Remember I told you that every writer out to sit down to spell aught his philosophy for acting as he does?”
I nodded, though it was a forest then that surrounded the cabin in which I lay nestled between the covers, far from cosmopolitan constraints. His evenings could charge with the gas lit lanterns in sight from his pond, that is, after a mile’s walk along a friendly trail. This next walk will repeat, though I hope with less chagrin, the episode that I went in need of a phone charger to the mall, meandering about the north until I doubled back and took direction west.
The yellow pages had no listing for the cellular t-mobile store I had in mind from an earlier glance online. The full-lipped cellular wireless attendant knew the mall could have an outlet. The mall was unknown to the employee at the coffee and donut store but his manager knew the name of the street. Heading west two black teens said it was after the bridge past McDonalds and were also going that way. I felt inclined to traipse along with them if only to eavesdrop, but an event back at home would begin with dinner in the hour.
Dark had settled already and a jogger in full street clothes raises suspicions, so I slowed when a cop and I came to the same red light. With the cross walk permitting, my pace resumed the patience of an elderly marathoner. A few blocks trod underway before I slowed again, this time respectful of the Sabbath as the men who gathered at the corner broke up for home.
Hungry, or at least anticipating hunger, I suspected the mall could not service my ebt relief card so the liquor store past the McDonalds seemed worth a try. “What?” the clerk said. I saw no food on the shelves and no need to explain. EBT won’t pay for alcohol, I knew. Sometime later, on the way home, my pockets stuffed with a protein bar, a V8, and a banana, I was glad to have resisted all the menu’s displayed in the food courts. Each time I looped through them, whiling my time as my phone charged up it’s long dead battery, the food courts and their customers seemed, at best, dispassionate.
The large man whom I recognized from one pass had sat alone then, and though he quite outsized me, my quick pace must have given him a fright because he stopped and let me pass. Even parking lot sidewalks do not sooth the nerves of some defensive pedestrians. He crossed the street and emboldened me to shortcut the corner also, so in our own ways we left the shopping center grounds.
Midway through the street, a driver inclining toward the turn lane of the intersection, slowed to give me the right of way but peered at me unsure through the windshield as though, curious, but skeptical of the figure I cut at that hour, perhaps simply ogling me for choosing to walk. I couldn’t tell, but felt cardboard, two-dimensional, reduced to the caricature of a rogue.
When no one looks at you for most of an entire night’s walk, the stares stick with you and then remain like a fastidious widow rapping at your memory’s door and you continue to feel with a nag that for some debt you may have not fully paid, the look must have a meaning of which I am deserving. Thus, to forget a stare comes as a relief, just as it did when my mind flushed with new sugars after the seven-11 stop. And home would appear, unhurriedly, after a casual cell phone conversation with my mother.
