During the past week, a very close loved one was hospitalized with a nasty illness. The crisis seems past now, and for that I am supremely grateful. These scary moments do serve the purpose of placing things in the proper perspective. We realize all that we take for granted, and how quickly it might disappear.
There were two main ways to get to the hospital, which was located a good distance away, and was a place I’d fortunately never visited before. Both involved main roadways that were at the center of my childhood. I varied the commute, in order to soak in the memories. I hadn’t been in those areas for quite a while. As I drove, I marveled at the changes. Well, marveled isn’t the right word. Cringed? Gasped? Almost wept? Of course, every business that was there when I was a fat kid in America 1.0 was long gone. But the signs above the entrances, in unrecognizable languages, advertised not the natural passage of time, but some kind of foreign conquest. These were the spoils of a war that wasn’t fought. It was as if Annandale, and Falls Church, had been bombed by one of our imaginary enemies. There were few if any vestiges left to pine over. All that was missing were the white flags of surrender.
The 3 Chefs is long gone. So is the Fuddruckers that replaced it. I didn’t even pay attention to what’s there now. Probably something with a sign I couldn’t understand. I spent many a night on the weekends there, rolling in with my friends at three in the morning, after long and arduous partying. It was one of the few all night restaurants in northern Virginia. They featured kindly, little old lady waitresses who called you honey, and kept bringing you more homemade biscuits. My brother started out his undistinguished working career there, and was fired for dropping some plates. It was a foretelling of what was to come. There was the Annandale bakery, where we would usually go on Sundays after mass at St. Michael’s. I loved their jelly doughnuts, and their cocoanut cakes.
Where was Clark’s Music Store? Old man Clark was a legend in Annandale. He seemed ancient to me at the time. You had to speak very loudly for him to hear you. The dust on the books and music sheets were appropriate. My old friend Mark Costello worked there. Like so many of these old places, Mark is no longer here, swept from this mortal coil at far too young an age. Where is the Penguin Feather, which was Rainbow Tree before that, where I bought most of my records? They had pot paraphernalia upstairs, which was oddly legal to sell, even though the drug itself was not. As I tended to like underappreciated artists, I made out very well in the discounted, cutout section. You could usually smell marijuana in the air, just as you could at every rock concert I ever attended back in those days.
Not far from there was Annandale Bowling Alley. We spent pretty much every Saturday night there, up through the late 1980s. We were never great bowlers, but we had some great times. At midnight, they turned down the lights and if you got a strike with a red head pin, you won a free game. I hope the statue of limitations on it has run out, but I must confess to getting lots of free games when I hadn’t gotten a strike, or even had a red head pin. I blame it on the alcohol. And the southern rock, which would start blaring and inevitably result in some kind of fight, somewhere among the lanes. Sometimes the beer glasses would fly, and the cops would be called. We just minded our business. Well, except for falsely claiming free games, that is. Nowadays, the police would ignore the fights, and tase us for our petty crimes.
Down Columbia Pike a bit used to be Columbia Pizza, one of those old places, probably run by Greeks, that wasn’t a franchise, You weren’t getting the Papa John flavor at that place. That’s where I learned to love pizza. Across the street was the place that used to be Tops Drive-In when I was very young. I still remember my sister taking me there, and the female car hops waiting on you in your car, Happy Days style. Then it became a Ginos, and a Roy Rogers. It’s a Wendy’s now. I guess they have reserved that space for fast food establishments only. At any rate, at least the Wendy’s sign is in English. That can’t be said for the place that once was Rustler’s Steakhouse, where my late friend Joe Burton and I enjoyed so many meals forty plus years ago. We also sent many a steak back, just so we could get an extra baked potato. I guess maybe I was criminally inclined back then. I can’t interpret the sign there now.
Gone is the Spaghetti Mill, where they urged you to “tell all your friends you’ve been through the mill.” They had a huge scale there, where a slimmer, America 1.0 crowd wasn’t shy about weighing themselves. I doubt that would be a desirable feature at any restaurant now. The place would probably be sued for fat shaming. Maybe hate crime. At any rate, that was one of the places where Joe Burton and I “dined and dashed.” Ran out on the bill. I did that a bit too often. I guess it’s little wonder that I became such a Thought Criminal. Sport and Hobby is long gone, replaced by yet another foreign business. I got all my baseball stuff there. We took our Little League caps there, to have them stitch on the letter of our sponsor. I bought my Wilson baseball glove there. Strangely, I can’t remember what Big Leaguer signed it. Maybe Carl Yastrzemski? Baseball was a huge part of my childhood.
Next door to Sport and Hobby was Drug Fair, a now extinct place where I bought most of my baseball cards and comic books. You could actually buy something with pocket change then. A nickel for a pack of baseball cards, with a stick of Bazooka bubble gum included. Twelve cents for a comic book. I often went for the 80 page Giant comics, which were a real bargain for a quarter. Driving further down Columbia Pike, I passed the turn where my old fiancee lived. I unwisely became engaged at only twenty to a nurse a few years older. I would never have married her, but always had trouble breaking up with girls. I couldn’t stand to see the look on their face. Part of my bleeding heart personality, I suppose. At any rate, she shocked me by initiating the breakup. I was overjoyed. It felt strange to drive by that area, almost fifty years later.
The Annandale Theater is long gone, too, as is the Bradlick Theater. In those days, there were no multiplexes. Stand alone theaters were all you had. I can remember waiting in a long line outside the Bradlick Theater to see Mary Poppins. And A Hard Day’s Night. Not sure which memories belong to which lines, but both were very long. There was the Safeway, where my father took me to get the “big order” every Friday. I’d sometimes play in the schoolyard next to the store. I learned to swing there. Not a pedophile in sight. There was an A & P we sometimes shopped at as well, and less frequently, Grand Union. I can’t remember which store gave you yellow stamps, but you got green stamps at Grand Union. You could trade the stamps for prizes at another local store, but you had to accumulate a gazillion of them to get anything decent. If they still had stamps, I’d probably still not have enough to get that drum set.
Taking the Falls Church route, I passed by the spot that was once Cohen’s Toy Store. My father would sometimes take me there, to pick out just one toy. Mr. Cohen was a kindly, hands on proprieter, as was often the case in America 1.0. On the other side of Route 50 was the spot where the Jefferson Theater once stood. I saw a lot of movies there in the early to mid 1960s. Around the corner from it was High’s, where I would sometimes be treated to an ice cream cone afterwards. Seven Corners was the first mall in northern Virginia. Well, it was kind of a paltry mall, not like the ones that would come later. But it’s where I did all my Christmas shopping. And farther down Route 50 was Montgomery Ward, which was my favorite store for some reason. Ward’s, Sears, Woodward & Lothrop- they’re all gone now. Memories of a once prosperous nation, where retail actually paid a living wage.
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