Once in a while childhood memories of Saturday afternoons in Baton Rouge float to the surface and I think back to those strolls down Third Street after a showing of Old Yeller or Jailhouse Rock at the Paramount, that aimless drift that sometimes carried us to the open doors of Woolworth’s. A store long gone, its aisles and smells are still anchored in some part of my brain awaiting the next spur.
The spark this time was a poem stumbled upon in one of the three Garrison Keillor anthologies, Good Poems for Hard Times, a poem by Minnesota poet Mark Irwin. It comes from Irwin’s 1996 collection, Quick, Now, Always and is titled “Woolworth’s.”
By way of introduction to readers unfamiliar with the name, Woolworth’s was one of the original American five-and-dime stores and one of the largest retail chains in the world during the twentieth century. It was one of the first American stores to put merchandise out for shoppers to handle and select without the assistance of a sales clerk. From 1913 until 1930 the Woolworth Building in New York was the tallest building in the world.
WOOLWORTH’S
Everything stands wondrously multicolored
and at attention in the always Christmas air.
What scent lingers unrecognizably
between that popcorn, grilled cheese sandwiches,
malted milkballs, and parakeets? Maybe you came here
in winter to buy your daughter a hamster
and were detained by the bin
of Multicolored Thongs, four pair
for a dollar. Maybe you came here to buy
some envelopes, the light blue par avion ones
with airplanes, but caught yourself, lost,
daydreaming, saying it’s too late over the glassy
diorama of cakes and pies. Maybe you came here
to buy a lampshade, the fake crimped
kind, and suddenly you remember
your grandmother, dead
twenty years, floating through the old
house like a curtain. Maybe you’re retired,
on Social Security, and came here for the Roast
Turkey Dinner or the Liver and Onions,
or just to stare into a black circle
of coffee and to get warm. Or maybe
the big church down the street is closed
now during the day, and you’re homeless and poor,
or you’re rich, or it doesn’t matter what you are
with a little loose change jangling in your pocket,
begging to be spent, because you wandered in
and somewhere between the bin of animal crackers
and the little zoo in the back of the store
you lost something, and because you came here
not to forget, but to remember to live.
Currently teaching at the University of Southern California, Mark Irwin divides his time between California and Colorado. He has published six collections of poetry, the latest in 2008.
