By Jim Hagarty
I ate my lunch in the food court of a lovely little shopping mall in a nearby city recently.
It is one of the city’s oldest malls which is fitting, in a way, because it appears as though there is a dress code for the place: You have to have white hair to be allowed entry.
Meeting the code, I fit right in, which was a problem for me. I looked around at everyone who looks pretty much like me now and thought, “Oh no, these are my people.”
I took out my cellphone and looked at the crowd of 50 or 60 people and thought, “I bet if you held everybody upside down and shook them, only three cellphones would fall out of the pockets of everyone here.” And even I am behind; mine is not a smartphone. (I have since upgraded.)
I also doubted there were very many computer-users in the group, but I bet their homes are filled with radios, radios, radios and lots of tube TVs. Not very many CD or DVD players and not one BluRay (I don’t have one yet myself). And I bet a daily newspaper gets dropped on the doorstep of most of the people there.
There were several tables of men only, swapping tales amidst uproarious laughter. At a couple of tables, women sat by themselves drinking a coffee and reading a novel. A younger man arrived at the table next to me but even he had almost-white hair. I suspect he dyed it just to fit in. He spread out a feast before him and also picked up a novel. At only one table did I see what you might call young people – two mothers with their infants in strollers.
Finishing my pizza, I took a stroll past the stores and could see that they reflected the crowd. There was a big drug store at one end and an optometrist half way down the stretch. Another big store offered home health products such as special walkers and foot baths and massagers. And as though to put an exclamation point on my no-cellphones observation, there was a bank of payphones in the front entrance, the better to call a cabbie with.
I never thought about a mall having a personality before but this winter I wrote about skating at an indoor rink in a shopping mall in Cambridge and realizing that I was the oldest person on the ice. That realization gave me kind of a sinking feeling.
Today, I was one of the younger ones in the food court of the mall. Same sort of feeling, coming from a different direction.
Guess I’m going to give up malls as they appear to be contributing to the aging process.
This one had great pizza, though.
