Another change, a memory lost

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

I don't get sentimental over the closing of stores anymore. Things change. Things change so often and so fast that change itself isn't as dramatic as it used to be. One store pulls down its shades, and a few weeks later another opens its doors, and for the most part, I hardly notice.

But I used to. I used to mourn the passing of the places I frequented as a child. I carried a mental picture of the way things were, the way I thought they always would be, and I expected life to honor that picture. I wanted the places I loved to stay just as I remembered, untouched like the room of someone on a vacation, who at any moment may return.

It was OK for me to leave and to change. But it wasn't OK for the movie theater or the library or Rexall drug to suddenly disappear. For as long as they existed, I was still a child. I could walk into the drug store and order a vanilla Coke and taste youth. I could slip into the old Turner Free Library and smell sixth grade. I could sit in the dark of the Randolph Theater and feel 10 or 12 or 13 again.

If they were gone; if they changed...

They did, of course. All things do. I moaned, and sometimes I cried. But the changes happened anyway. The library burned down. The movie theater was demolished. The drug store was sold and the soda fountain removed.

And I grew up and left home. But in the early years of being a grown-up, I was never able to drive through Randolph without aching for a past that seemed within arm's reach, but was already a million miles away.

When South Shore Plaza was renovated in the early '70s, I was an adult, in my mid-20s, married with children. I shouldn't have cared by then about the sentimental value of stores. It shouldn't have bothered me that the Plaza's owners planned to change this shopping complex into a sprawling mall.

And yet it did, because I had worked at Cummings when I was 16 and 17, nights and Saturdays and summers, and my mother had worked at Wethern's and Sheridan's and we had driven to work together, and eaten lunch and dinner together. And though that had been just a few years before, we had both changed so much. I was old now and my mother was critically ill, and the Randolph we both knew was no more, and I didn't want the Plaza to change, too, because then what would be left?

Before its renovations, when you stepped out of a store, you were outdoors in a common area. Then the walls went up and a roof hid the sky and one by one stores that had thrived surrounded by the unpredictable outdoors, died in the controlled environment. Sheridan's closed. Then Wethern's. Dr. Coppleman, the optometrist, took his business somewhere else. The shoe store next to Cummings changed hands. The travel agency moved. Even Woolworth's disappeared.

Now I can no longer picture what the place looked like back then. Only a few of the original stores remain. And I don't care about any of them, anymore, except one.

That one is closing Feb. 1. When its lease runs out, the owners of South Shore Plaza plan to rent the space Lauriat's now occupies to a more profitable clothing store. When and if a second level is built in the mall, another Lauriat's may open, but in the meantime this bookstore is history.

So, too, is my youth. I know that. But as long as Lauriat's was there, a tiny last remnant remained.

For it was in this store that I bought my first hard cover book. It was 1964. I was a senior in high school. I worked at Cummings for $1.15 an hour. Paperbacks were 35 and 50 cents. McDonald's hamburgers were 15 cents. The book I chose cost $4.50. Back then $4.50 was a lot of money.

But, oh, how I wanted a real book - not a school book, not a paperback book, but a book that smelled like the books at the library.

I stood for a long time at a table that held the new books, deciding which to buy. The one I chose had to be perfect. It was to be the first in a collection I was about to begin.

Was it perfect? It must have been. Though I had never heard of the author; though I had never heard of the people who said nice things about the author on the back cover; though I can no longer remember what the book was about, I know it brought me joy.

In the end, I chose it for its title, "Things As They Are," and for its first line: "`Richard, Richard,' they said to me in my childhood, `when will you begin to see things as they are?"'

Who wants to see things as they are, I thought then.

Who wants to see things as they are, I think now.

It's only a bookstore that's closing. I know that. Another will probably take its place. Yet it is this store in this place that I will miss, because it is connected to a distant time and place, which recedes a little further every day.