Spring is coming and that means new summer clothing.  I generally buy nice clothes from various places around town, but for everyday wear, jeans and a t-shirt is fine.  The best place for t-shirts, Russell Athletic pocket t-shirts, is J.C. Penny.  They always have them, for some reason they are always on sale, and I can go each spring and buy a bagful.  The downside is that J.C. Penny is at the mall.

I don't like shopping malls, and can't remember the last time I went to one.  Most likely last year when I bought shirts.  This time I put it off for as long as I could until my last good shirt developed a hole.  Now I had no choice.  I got the bus and rode 10 minutes to Washington Square.  I got my t-shirts, then decided to look around.

A mall is a really weird place to me.  The acres of hot asphalt covered with automobiles in every describable condition and color, plus the large, imposing, industrial buildings should make the place pretty foreboding.  All malls remind my of factories, or the brick buildings in a train yard...without the tracks of course.  Both places I would choose to avoid given the chance.  I'd choose to avoid a mall, too, but many others wouldn't.  Crowds are the rule of the day, and outside the mall a crane was erecting yet another mulit-level parking lot.

Because I do it so infrequently, walking into a mall is an experience in itself.  Sort of like seeing TV for the first time after six months with nothing but books.  And I think, like TV, it's the overwhelming noise and advertising that comes as a bit of a shock when entering a mall.  Heck, I could only describe is as walking into the TV set.  All the products blaringly advertised on the tube are right there in the mall, on posters and store fronts, larger than life, blaring just as loudly in that blistering white mall light.

Too bright, the mall is, with lights bright enough to fill the Astrodome.  The stores are bright, the products for sale are bright, the food in the food court is bright.  Everything is bright, except the people.  Strange, but mall people have a sort of sameness to them, an unsmiling sameness, beset with determination and a bit of confusion.  And there seems to be a uniform of the day, subdued colors and flip flops for the girls, baggy pants and flat brimmed baseball caps for the boys, polo shirts and safe haircuts for the adults.

Not that I'm a fashion plate by any means, jeans and t-shirts are pretty run of the mill, but at least I wear a colorful hat and interesting shoes.  There are plenty of places at the mall to buy shoes.  No place to buy a hat unless you want a cap with an athletic logo.  Hats are out of style, and I can't understand why.  In the blazing light of a mall, a hat is a handy thing to have.  But like the stores selling only shoes (not an unusual thing) other stores specialize in only one accouterment or product that can be pretty esoteric.  A store just for day planners, for example.  Day planners, by the way, are notebooks.  Pads of paper.  Another store specializes in hairbands.  That's it.  Just hairbands.

All these stores have odors.  Navigating the mall, among other things, is a nasal minefield.  Between the salons and their hair dye concoctions, and the perfume stores oozing samples and spills, and the various cookeries and their poisons, the nose is in for more than a treat.  It's an impossible challenge to avoid any offensive odor in spite of what must be enormous environmentally distressing air handlers humming somewhere atop the installation.

At the far end of one hallway I found respite in the form of a couch.  Yes, they have couches and easy chairs in the mall, many occupied by bored men surrounded by pastel colored bags, or teenagers on cell phones.  I imagine a sports bar in a central kiosk would make alot of money.  There are already cell phone vendors in central kiosks.

Sitting on the sofa let me focus on individual movement, sort of like looking through a zoom lens.  Some people wander, others beeline, and a few just do nothing at all.  Children are everywhere.  The store I was near must have been very unpopular, or expensive, because people didn't stay long.  The pattern rarely changed.  Approach from the right, enter store, leave almost immediately and continue left.  I don't recall what they were selling, or, I should say, not selling, but I guess that's the point.  Nothing worth remembering.

I could have fallen asleep on that couch, but I had a bus to catch.  Grabbing my pile of shirts, I found my way outside and walked around to the bus stop.  Walking outside a mall can be even more treacherous than walking inside it.  Sidewalks do not exist, and autos seem to have no direction.  People operating cars at the mall all seem to be looking everywhere except straight ahead; looking for that elusive parking spot I assume.

I eventually made it home, none the worse for wear, but honestly I can't understand the attraction.  What is it about a mall that draws so many people?  If anyone knows, or has any ideas, I'd love to hear them.