Mail-Order


When I started school each year, I knew that there would be a mail-order that would come from Sears. There would be new blue jeans, shirts, socks, underwear, belts, coats, and many other items. My shoes I always got from the Men’s Store owned by Gleason. It was next to the only bar in town at the time. It made it just a little exciting to be so close to that iniquitous place.
Carl J. Stubbs at work with Robert Stubbs visiting 
I worked as a kid in the grocery store. Often, I would just deliver groceries in a couple of paper sacks that were more substantial than they are today. I always got to meet people and often stopped to talk to them. Sometimes when I got back to work, they asked me what took so long, and I just shrugged my shoulders and said they wanted to go over the register list with the groceries. When I went to college, I would work there in the summers as a clerk to make enough money to go back to school. People would call in their orders, and we would fill them and bag them and then put them in the pickup to be delivered.
In time that type of “mail-order” shopping kind of came to an end. It was so much more fun to go to the large stores. Some of those stores had elevators and escalators. These were not to be played with or on or around, but sometimes they got to be ridden. They would be a B ride at Disneyland, and if you know what that means, you are really old. It took longer to go to Sears and Penney’s, but it was a lot more fun to look at the clothes you were going to buy and to try them on.
Now that we are having this Coronavirus pandemic, we are often going back to the mail order type life. Joy purchased a new chair for me, but I didn’t like it, and it went back. We have ordered all of our groceries from Walmart online and then drive there and they come out and put it in our trunk and we go home. We never have to go into the store or carry them out to the car, but we do have to put them away when we get home. Of course, only after Joy has bathed them in an antiviral bath, or wet cloth.
This is really a convenience, but it is to keep us safe from the virus. Joy and I are both over seventy years old and at risk, if we were to contract the virus. I’ll be happy when the threat is over, and we can go back to what we used to see as normal. I actually enjoyed going to the store to shop and to McDonald’s for their breakfast burritos, but for now, we are here making our own food, never going out except to run to the mailbox with a sack so as to not get infected, get the paper and quickly come back into the house and peer out the windows and see the birds and think that it is quite unfair that they fly around anywhere they would like and see everything. I’m not sure which I would prefer, to be able to fly or to see everything. I’m going with flying because I would not remember everything I saw.

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