Time with mom wasn’t wasted either. Before my trip began, and during it, mom touted this place called The Giant Food Market. I didn’t know what to think, I mean, how am I supposed to feel about a supermarket, even a giant one? But the constant build-up had stirred my curiosity, though I couldn’t believe, nor could she really convey, what was in store. On the Monday of my second week in town the whole family arose early and mom drove dad out to the base for his work, then she took me to The Giant.
Ok, it looked big from the outside, but all the buildings there were bigger than in my hometown. The Giant parking lot could have contained about half of downtown Madisonville, and when I entered the store saw that the other half could easily be contained within. The darned place was huge. The ceiling was twenty feet up, and the walls were about 150 yards apart.
Our excuse for being there wasn’t grocery shopping but breakfast. A wall-less, open air restaurant section sat roped off to the right of the entrance. Only a few places opened for breakfast (others opened for lunch and dinner only), but the selection was impressive. We ate at a diner like business that served food on Formica tables. I usually had pancakes or scrambled eggs, and maybe cereal with fruit. I didn’t mind waking early that day.
After breakfast we started to look around and explore. One of the restaurants we walked past had an open flame beneath a rotisserie that skewered an entire side of beef, just like I’d seen in westerns. One path led through the diabetic section, which was nearly as big as Sloan’s entire store in Madisonville. The shelves of low cal stuff emptied into the fresh catch bins of the fish market. I saw silver, beheaded fish better than four feet long. That day was the first time I had encountered squid. “Whatta ya do with those?” I asked. “Some people eat em,” mom answered.
We eventually wandered into the toy section. Christ, they had everything there. I think mom bought me a mask, flippers, and snorkel there that first time. I also stumbled onto the comics rack. To my surprise, many of the titles were packaged in groups of three (for only a quarter) inside a sealed plastic wrapper. The catch, of course, was that the middle title, sandwiched between the other two, was a blind man’s bluff. Still, at three for the price of two, the risk, especially since it was mom’s money, seemed worth the possibility of a pitiful outcome. Well, here’s the thing: the good part was that I got to read, over the summer, about two years’ worth of Spider Man, quite a few Fantastic Four titles, Ironman issues, and some other things to boot. I got several issues of Teen Age Hotrodders, and one or two issues of Space Family Robinson. The down side was that Archie Comics (not the worst, but not what I wanted), or Donald Duck, and sometimes a repeat of a comic I already owned occasionally turned up in the mix.
Something about The Giant that I discovered in subsequent days (I couldn’t see everything in one trip) was the ice cream counter. They had one treat that I thought was the greatest in the world. It was really a banana split, but instead of a plastic boat, it came in a slightly hollowed-out pineapple. Eating one was usually a two try event. I tried several times that summer.
I thought nothing could top The Giant, but on the way home we stopped at a more meager department store (sorry, but I don’t remember the name) which turned out to be as important as The Giant because it had toys, especially models, baseball equipment, packages of comics (same as The Giant), an arcade, and a large number of paperbacked publications that I was interested in. I purchased several repackaged collections of Mad Magazine features, including Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, and a couple of compilations of newspaper funnies. My Virginia model collection began there with a couple of models and all the supplies needed to assemble and paint them. Before the summer wound down I had put together two of the great air forces of WWII, in that I acquired fighters of the US and Germany, and a B-17 bomber.
Monday was mom’s day off, and I don’t think we missed kicking off the week at The Giant for the entire summer. Sometimes after breakfast we’d go home for bit before heading to the beach in the afternoon, or even to my aunt and uncle’s. On the way home we usually had a Burger King meal, or sometimes stopped at Freddie’s because I loved its spaghetti (still my favorite dish) and pizza. I also tasted my first Chinese food (always pork chow mein) that summer. There was too much to do to ever be bored. Who needed baseball?
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