Grocery stores only sell groceries now. You might find shampoo, or toothpaste, and maybe some really expensive batteries, but mostly it’s just food now. When I was a kid, grocery stores used to sell anticipation.
Here’s how it worked; one otherwise normal day you’d walk in and find a huge display of something entirely ungroceryish, which was being offered for nearly no money. Luxury plastic tumblers, or the first three volumes of a deluxe encyclopedia, or oversized full color prints from the Great Masters. And who wouldn’t spend .49 cents to add the inspiration from the greatest of Michelangelo’s works to the frozen spinach and corn flakes in their cart?
These items followed the oldest rules of street hustle capitalism; the first taste was free, get you hooked. Sure, volumes A through D were only 49 cents, but from there on out you’d need to drop a cool 2.50 to be able to look up an eagle. So we dutifully came back, not quite extra cash in hand, building our library or gallery or full entertainment complement, week by week. And besides the alphabet with the encyclopedias, we didn’t really know what was coming next all the time.
This is how I have the album “The World’s Most Beautiful Music”, celebrating the classical works most beloved around the world according to a panel of people at the Columbia Record company in the 1970’s who were not at all experts or statisticians. My mother would not spend a penny on extraneous items, yet these seemed educational. Was there an easier way to get a 12 x 18 print from Cezanne and Miro? Not in 1976.
The best part was the waiting. We got groceries on Thursdays, because Friday and Saturday the stores were too packed, and I think the displays went up maybe on Wednesday, because when we got there it was like Christmas Morning, all freshly stocked and shiny. We would look at the new artist and together rate their work according to our personal tastes, then throw it in the cart as if we were doing them a favor by bringing them home. Encyclopedias were easier; there wasn’t really any letter of the alphabet we could do without, so I got to follow my mom around the store and open the book early, looking up giraffes or kangaroos or ring tailed monkeys.
Now: there are subscription boxes, which rarely tell you exactly what’s inside before you get it, ‘cause that’s part of the surprise, but it’s the same simple pleasure – a gift without holiday justification that you sort of expect, a scheduled unknown every 60 to 90 days. The main product? In both cases? Anticipation: only because we don’t know the exact date the box full of the stuff we don’t know what it is will show up. It’s fun to think about it and wonder and then it happens.
Anticipation is now called “supply chain issues”, only because to anticipate requires a certain amount of mystery – as the only thing that’s absolutely no fun to wait for, is the inevitable. Death. Taxes. That super super hot day every summer when you don’t want to move. You know it’s going to happen, but you’re not looking forward to it. Anticipation is a casserole of “will it?” and “when is it?”; that event that hopefully the weather will hold out for, or that far off vacation that has a million things ahead of it that need to be done.
So on these grocery store visits as a kid, I knew there’d be something there but I had no clue as to what it was going to be. Super Exciting. Remember, I lived in Kansas. Although, to be fair, weather in Kansas City? Lots of anticipation… it could warm you, cool you, or try to destroy you utterly, hot or cold.
Now: there’s Amazon. Items are ordered, and we no longer anticipate their arrival, we expect them to show up. There’s a short but very important road between those two for me. Expectations are what parents hold for children: they are based on careful research and projection coupled with analysis to predict a general supposition of a potential outcome that you’d better achieve if you want that new bicycle. An expectation is a formula, it’s a recipe, you expect this thing to happen because it’s logical, it’s science, right? Anticipation is the die well cast but not yet landed, its the plan well writ but not yet fully realized. I mean, would you want to be on a plane where the pilot explained before take off that they anticipated landing eventually rather than expected to land in 4 hours? One is a plan, the other, a wish.
There was a quirky folky rock song that Carly Simon sold to a ketchup company for a commercial in the ‘70’s about anticipation that I can still sing from memory. Well, at least the commercial part, the verse is about love or something – I don’t know, I was 10 back then, ketchup was more important that love. In my head though, I can still see the ketchup barely moving while fully inverted, defying all physics in its supposed premium quality thickness, while in the background the earthy acoustic authenticity of Carly’s voice sang out the perfect word for the situation. Anticipation.
I remember joining a fan club and sending them a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope. I remember writing a letter and sending it in the mail and waiting for a letter back. I remember thinking about how great strawberry season was gonna be. I remember watching Empire Strikes Back and wondering how I was gonna survive the next three years. Waiting did not destroy me, or ruin my life – in fact it added to it as my imagination filled the gap between desire and delivery. Sometimes it was the journey toward fulfillment, not the actual destination, that was the most fun. And most of this stuff wasn’t expensive or anything, yet it still held the highest of valuations, that it was absolutely worth waiting for.
One of our greatest American pundits once posited that “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Constantly getting fills our field of vision completely, but waiting opens up the edges, and sometimes a little bit of the middle, and lets us dream for a bit. I can’t wait to have that feeling again.
Well, yeah, I can.
©2022 Jd Michaels / CabsEverywhere Productions
Say it! Say it!