Observation No. 10: Town Square

If you want to find Anchorage of a Tuesday afternoon, look no further than the mid-town Wal-Mart. I read an interview with Billie Letts who wrote the book Where the Heart Is (which later became the movie) and she said that she chose Wal-Mart as the setting because she was looking for the modern day of equivalent of a town square in United States. In the book, the main character finds herself homeless and living at Wal-Mart until the birth of her daughter. Letts was looking for a place in America where people still meet and mingle and live their lives.

I remembered this today as I stopped by Wal-Mart after work to pick up face soap and grass fertilizer. The place was packed with tiny vignettes of color.

There were the three girls in the clothing department exclaiming over the cuteness of impossibly tiny, shorts the color of candy that were labeled $4.99. In the face cream aisle, a twenty-something women complained to her mother about her blackheads as her the older woman advised her to see a dermatologist. There was the boy who was working in the garden department who was surprised when I held the door open so he could angle a heavy cart through. There was the patience as 20 people waited for three tellers to slowly check us out, edging forward under the florescent lights. The man in front of me offered to let me move in front of him in soft, hesitant English. I told him to go ahead but he stepped beyond me anyways.

We all watched as a little girl with curly hair, wearing white leather sandals a size too small, begged her older brother for a sucker from a Ziploc bag that he carried and her teenaged siblings urged her to be quiet. We waited as an older couplecarefully counted out exact change for their purchases. We watched as a teller frantically tried to fix his register and then flicked his sign to flashing, alerting the manager.

Letts might have seen aspects of town square at Wal-Mart and I see some of that. But I also see the bus station--dreary, dodgy with some long lines. It’s a place where you come because you need to be there—a place with thousands of lives rushing through, on their way to somewhere else.