Today was just an ordinary day in our household. I crawled out of bed around 7:45 a.m. Mornings are my favorite time of the day. Everyone has a time of day they feel most productive and alert, mine happens to be in the morning hours before noon. After noon I slowly start to decline. Toby and Summer's tend to be after 7:00 p.m in the evenings.
Sometimes this does not make for a very good mesh. I am ready to get school done and over with by noon, where as Summer is just starting to function on a comprehending level by noon or later. Because of Toby's work schedule, he doesn't function well in the a.m. either. This usually has me tapping my foot and cracking the whip in the mornings. We still seem to somehow get things done around here.
We didn't plan much of anything today 'cause Toby had to be at work at 5:00 p.m. We did get out and about to Sears, Lowes and H-E-B. We ate lunch at Panda Express which was a treat for us. We had never eaten there before. Toby called it Chinese fast food. In my personal opinion it tasted just as good as the Chinese buffets....and it cost almost as much too!
It brought back memories of a place in the Bel-Air Mall (it's called something else now but for the life of me I can't remember what it is) in Alabama. Summer and I used to venture the mall a pretty good bit when we lived in Mobile, not because I liked the mall or even shopped there, but because Summer liked it for whatever reason.
There was a Chinese eating establishment in the mall. A Chinese man would stand out in front with a platter of chicken samples hollering..."honey chicken" over and over again in his Chinese accent. For some reason this memory of Mobile is one of the many that stick out most in my mind.
Our routine was the same every time we visited the mall. We would enter the Target entrance, cut through through J.C. Penney's just because I loved Penney's clothes, straight into the main mall.
Summers favorite stores were the Arcade, Disney store and K.B Toys. The last thing we would do was ride the mall carousel. After that we would then have our lunch at the "honey chicken" place. It stunk like dirty bathrooms in the place, but Summer never seemed to notice. She would always eat her honey chicken like it were her last meal.
Having spent all of my years familiar with the mall in Mobile...even working in there for a short while when I was a teenager, I never realized just how small it was until I moved to Austin and ventured their mall. Like I have said many times before.."bigger does not always mean better." Austin may have many more stores in their mall, but it doesn't hold the memories for me that the dinky mall in Mobile does.
Speaking of memories, mine and my daughter's perceptions are so different since we have been in Texas. I sometimes will bask in all the memories of the cool things we used to do when she was young where as she has very little recognition of her young life in Mobile. I'm assuming like most of us, she will eventually have very vague memories of her life before the age of 5.
I guess all the past memories will be mine. The memories she makes here will be hers to remember. Life is strange, is it not??
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I loved your vivid memory of that place smelling like "dirty bathrooms". I think we can all relate to that! :-)
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to think of your memories of your daughter's childhood being *your* memories rather than hers--I think we forget how little we remember from our own childhoods but we expect our kids to remember more somehow. Memory is such a funny thing, isn't it? So patchy and at the same time it can be so vivid.
What a fun read!