Go Brown

Red Fraggle and I were just IMing, and for some reason I mentioned that FedEx doesn't deliver to my house. She was aghast. I explained that it was OK, because UPS does deliver, and I've always liked them better anyway. The big brown trucks remind me of the excitement of getting a package when I was a child . . . and she totally couldn't relate. So I explained that when I was young, seeing the UPS truck was exciting in the same way that the arrival of the Sears catalog was exciting. Her response: "LOL! Sears catalog! I always wondered who that was exciting to. I remember reading a story when I was young about someone waiting with anticipation for the Sears catalog and thinking 'REALLY?!'"

See, Red grew up in the crowded northeast, near New York. For her, the ability to go shopping for a new skirt or to a toy store wasn't a big deal. But in the 1980s, in this part of the country, it was a HUGE deal. In some ways, my childhood bears a stronger resemblance to the average American childhood of the 1950s than the 1980s. The available shopping options, as I remember them, were Shavers, a sort of dry goods store combined with a grocery store, (sort of a smaller precurser to SuperTarget without the high-falutin obsession with "design" for the masses) and the old-fashioned drug store across the street that sold cards and tchotchkes and stuffed animals in the aisles between the drug counter and the soda fountain.

And even making the 200 mile round trip Boise didn't net much of an improvement. Back then its population was well under 200,000 and the shopping opportunities were accordingly slim. Boise didn't have many of the big chain stores . . . I think there was a JC Penney and a Sears . . . and the only mall in the entire state was in Nampa (another 30 miles away) and it boasted a Bon Marche, a fabric store, a three screen movie theater, an Orange Julius, and maybe a Foot Locker? It was TINY by today's standards. And that was it.

So for the things my mom couldn't make herself (she made lots of my clothes), and the things we couldn't find in town, the Sears catalog was IT. I remember poring over the pages and pages of toys for hours. And on the rare occasions that my parents could justify the expense of purchasing something from that glossy book of delights, the package would come via a big brown UPS truck struggling up our horrible driveway. And the excitement was real, and it was gleeful, and I still feel a little faint echo of it every time I see a man or woman in brown polyester shorts bearing boxes.