As soon as my mother told me the news, I caught the first bus home. I hoped I wasn’t too late. Our old friend suddenly had a week to go, two weeks max. “Archer Big Store is going out of business,” she’d said.
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The Archer Big Store helped me show my wife, when words failed me, why I can’t bring myself to wear an earring. I tried to explain that I am a babushka twice removed. Babushkas are those simple-living Eastern European immigrants who love sausage and kraut, polkas, bingo, the pope, and the bungalow life on the southwest side, and who remember the good old days when there weren’t any communists, lazy-no-good-I-won’t-works, noisy teenagers down the block who drag-race their cars down the alley like a bunch of wild Indians, vegetarians, women who swear, black mayors, or men who wear earrings.
My mother didn’t go to the Big Store much, being a babushka once removed. She’s not a card-carrying babushka like her Czechoslovakian ancestors. She hates bingo and can laugh at a good pope joke. But when you’re born with babushka blood, you die with it. You can dilute it, but you can never wash it out–no matter how many transfusions you get by hanging around Marxist frugivores.
A box of buttons with Pope John Paul’s picture on them, commemorating his 1979 Chicago tour. Those were the glory days around here. The pope said mass a block away at Five Holy Martyrs Church, and they named that section of 43rd Street after him.
The women’s foundations department was the soul of discretion. Behind the counter were several identical sturdy white boxes containing unmentionables. The lid had been left off one, and you could see a girdle. On the bottom shelf in the corner were buxom plastic torsos.
