It's an empty box building now. A large ill conceived custom prefab job, the kind of thing that could only happen in the glory days of the McMansion, the late 1990's. Before that it was a squat brick structure,`long with almost no windows, the inside illuminated by the intermittent flickering of fluorescence leaving the corners dim and dusty. They tore down the old hobbit market to build the high ceilinged new one, an idea that never made any sense to me but at that age what does? It's a funny sort of pragmatism, the wisdom of the child, they are still able to see things plainly. I understood that Patterson's, the little brick neighborhood market and deli counter, closed down because it couldn't compete with the new Super Stop n' Shop Mega Market that opened up half a mile away. Now some brain factory threw up the monumental idea that a bigger more costly neighborhood market could meet the needs of the surrounding streets better than the commercial chain market could. It changed hands a few times. First it was the Andreonni's who built it then bailed to get into the restaurant business, then Mike Craven owner of the aptly named " Craven Pizza" across the street picked it up, unfortunately he was also one of the largest smugglers of marijuana in the lower 48 states and took an indefinite sabbatical to the Federal Work Farm. It changed hands a few more times after that until the final owners, in the face of a plunging real estate market and general economic slump, realized that they couldn't sell enough food to pay for the operating expenses of the massively mis-designed building. So it's empty, like the houses, like the storefronts like everything else.
I used to go to Patterson's with my mother, I remember how crisp the air was in there. It smelled of the salt and spice from the deli counter. I remember my mother getting her American cheese sliced by a man who defied age, an old butcher archetype, white hair, rosacia, white apron smeared lightly with his work. If I was good she would buy me a box of Ringling Brothers animal crackers. I would hold the sweet hard cookies in my mouth tracing their grooves and detail with my tongue, I would bite down and let the legs or head dissolve in my mouth. I lingered over the box ,examining the animals in their cages and comparing the drawings to their short bread equivalents. Riding away and staring out the window of mother's wood paneled station wagon the green lawns and gardens of the cold war suburbs passed by without incident. That was the old America there, in the little brick building, it just couldn't keep up with itself. Now we got nothing...and that's a start.
