Category: Personal

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.

For the first time in a long time my father has popped into my thoughts. I’m not sure what triggered it or why.

For some unknown reason I started thinking about my early childhood. Where I lived in Macon, Georgia. The old fishing spot, and the BBQ shack that my dad used to take me to.

Then I started searching for Dad on Google. As if maybe there would be some trace of the man I barely remember in the web’s collective consciousness.

A blog post about him by an old friend, perhaps? Maybe some old digitized records, or an old digitized newspaper article about him?

He died long before the advent of the world wide web, so I don’t know why that even crossed my mind.

The lack of his digital presence actually made me a little sad.

No photos of him. No mention of him anywhere outside a few ancestry website inquiries.

It shouldn’t bother me. He died more than 30 years ago. But it does.

It seems like everything and everyone is online in some form. Even long dead people are remembered here and there. It almost feels like nobody remembers Dad. Almost feels like nobody cares about him.

So this is just a little diary entry. A footnote on the internet that will be of no value to anyone but me. To serve as my own personal shrine, and digital memorial to my father.

Dad.

He took me fishing at Rocky Creek, on Houston Road between Macon and Warner Robbins. Sometimes we hunted squirrels there. He blasted rattlers and water moccasins with his shotgun.

We ate at Tucker’s Barbecue. I still crave their BBQ and Brunswick Stew.

He taught me to ride my bike in the parking lot of the DAV on Houston Avenue.

We drank Yoo-hoos and ate Slim Jims, that we bought at the Handy Andy gas station on Houston Avenue.

He’d take me to the McDonald’s on Rocky Creek Road for Egg McMuffins. I’d play on the giant purple Grimace and climb around inside the giant Hamburglar on the playground. I still have two of the Hot Wheels cars that he got for me in Happy Meals at that McDonald’s, the Firebird Funny Car and the Baja Breaker. My kids play with them now.

We’d go to the Dairy Queen not far from there on really hot Georgia summer nights for a banana split to cool us down.

We drank sweet tea on the steps at my Mamaws’ house on Wise Road. We lived two doors down from her.

He built a fort for me in the little patch of woods next to our house. There’s some kind of radio or cellular tower there now.

I remember playing “car mechanic” with my cousin, pretending to fix our little red wagon, while Dad and Uncle Rodney worked on a car in the garage beside us.

I remember Dad and Uncle Rodney boiling peanuts. I remember them making rock candy.

I remember riding along with Dad when he would go to work. I remember sitting on the doghouse of his Dodge van. I remember carrying buckets of glue and tools for laying carpet and vinyl.

I remember picking wild blackberries with him.

I remember resting my head on his chest and falling asleep to the sound of him breathing.

He died when I was 8. He’s buried in Evergreen Cemetery, in Macon, near the end of St James Avenue, right next to Mamaws.

I remember you, Dad.