We moved from Georgia to Minnesota when I was nine years old.
My older sister and I were not happy about the move. Everything and everybody we knew was in Georgia.
For me, anything that was different in Minnesota just seemed “odd,” and would kind of stick in my brain.
And I remember that there was a grocery store in the mall.
Now that stuck out for me because I had never seen a grocery store inside a mall before. Maybe that’s not unusual for you, but that’s the only one I’ve ever seen.
What I found even more odd, there was a conveyor belt at the checkouts. They put your bags on the conveyor belt, and it took the bags outside. You pulled your car around and a young employee would load your grocery bags into your car’s trunk.
Now, in recent years, I’ve brought this odd grocery store up to old school friends. None of them remembered this, even though they had all lived in this small town much longer than I had, some of them were even born here.
I was starting to think that maybe I imagined this whole thing, or that I was just misremembering and mixing up snippets of different memories. Brains are weird.
I was having dinner with my wife’s family tonight, and they mentioned something about when the grocery store used to be in the mall.
I said, “You remember that?! I thought I was going crazy because none of my friends remember that!”
Then I asked “And didn’t that grocery store in the mall have a conveyor belt at the checkouts, that delivered your bags outside so you could pick them up from your car?” And my in-laws confirmed that as well.
And all this time, my friends couldn’t remember this odd grocery store with the conveyer belt in the mall. It must have seemed completely normal to them at the time.
