Scenes from a Broadway Plaza
There’s a list of things people need during a pandemic and I’m sure that jewelry is near the bottom of that list.
And yet, in the year of covid, there is a line outside Tiffany’s ready to prove me wrong, day in and day out.
I do not know any of these people and I wonder what are the discussions that precipitate people to line up, up to ten groups at a time, not quite six feet apart, at this particular corner of Main and Mount Diablo.
There is no discernible pattern to the people in line. They are strangely diverse in size, stature, color, shape. I am sure, however, that they are all united in that they have money. I have no proof of this because I have never stepped inside a Tiffany’s or been bored enough to venture to their website.
I pick one couple and imagine their discussion. One is a tall, pudgy man with his shirt tucked in and his back a little too straight. Next to him is a slender woman with blonde, shoulder-length hair. I wonder if this couple has been stereotypically selected by the cosmic universe to push me into being even more stereotypical.
“Honey, I love you so much. Do you love me? Shall we spend an afternoon waiting in line, together, during covid, so that you can show me the depths of your affection through the purchase of metal and stone?”
This is the man I am imagining by the way.
Also near the bottom of “Things people need during a pandemic”—sexy underwear.
But there is also a line at Victoria’s Secret. An even longer line.
They are almost all younger women. Some are teenage girls. Occasionally there is a teenage boy walking out with an odd mixture of pride and embarrassment. Sometimes there are multiple teenage boys and they laugh and verbally slap each other’s backs because that’s their reward for spending fifteen minutes in a sexy underwear store.
I have been inside a Victoria’s Secret, although I still have no sense of how much things there cost, nor how much their value.
I have been that teenage boy, laughing because I dared to enter a sexy underwear store. I have been that young man, curious to see if they actually sell products for men. I almost walked in as a thirty-something, except the woman I was with was too uncomfortable and didn’t want to go.
For someone who has little interest in sexy underwear for women, it should be suspicious how many times I have been to Victoria’s Secret. Suffice to say, some things just can’t be explained and when you try, it’s like the magic just disappears.
Both Tiffany’s and Victoria’s Secret are now a part of my hometown outdoor mall called Broadway Plaza.
I venture through it many days of the week, more for exercise, less for shopping. Sometimes it is the scene of a morning stroll, sometimes of an evening jog.
Pre-pandemic, it is a hotbed of chaotic activity, especially during the holidays.
During lockdown—both of them—it is often quiet. During the first one, I could eat on the steps to what Apple once tried calling a Town Square. This one is certainly designed like a town square, a standalone store with the classic glass-for-walls look and wearing a white-on-the-outside hat on all four sides. There’s a fountain in front of it, because of course there is.
Many days I see some familiar faces.
There’s an elderly couple.
There’s another elderly couple, one who holds his partner steady as she pushes a walker. They remind me of my parents, and of how my mom wished that my dad would walk outside with her.
Companionship, after all, is one of those simple things people want in life, although when we get them we never seem to be satisfied with them. I’m thinking specifically of someone who loves his apartment—the lighting, the cute checked tile floor, the sink in the bathroom that’s so big he can wash his face like the women in a Neutrogena commercial—except he spends so much time checking out other houses on Redfin I wonder if he loves his apartment at all.
Also a familiar face is this man who power walks everywhere without a mask but at least he does it before nine a.m. when there’s no one around and he diligently pads ten feet of distance between him and everybody else. This seems weird and isolationist and antisocial at any other point in life but in these covid times it seems pretty considerate. I wonder if it can always be seen this way.
“I avoid people like the plague that we all are,” I imagine him saying to somebody.
“Wow good for you!” is the response, and it is a genuine one.
Away from Broadway Plaza and on the other side of downtown was once a McDonald’s. It’s long gone and I don’t know why.
“Because this place is too bougie for a McDonald’s so they kicked it out,” someone once said harshly.
It could also be because rent was too expensive, I countered. But sure, it could also be the bougie thing. Who knows.
My dad used to go to this McDonald’s for coffee before it closed down, so he started going to one in the next town over, before Alzheimer’s stopped him from going anywhere and the coffee had to start coming to him.
I used to come to this McDonald’s in college to meet with friends when we all came home because the Marie Calendar’s closed down and we had no other place for late-night get togethers.
There’s still nothing in its place, yet. They are building something. I don’t know what it is.
The current iteration of Broadway Plaza that is hip and “bougie” and of all things, a destination, is a relatively new phenomenon. The Broadway Plaza of my memory (and nostalgia) is a not-yet-renovated Nordstrom and maybe a Sears. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
What is true is that on the other side of Downtown are signs of what Downtown used to be. There are mom and pop shops and the random crepe place and a very-old looking performing arts center that, to be frank, looks like it puts on shows for the elderly and for Sunday School children.
I was once one of those Sunday School kids.
It’s hard to fathom that this part of Downtown—with its stores doing business out of grey-stone buildings or brick-walled buildings or aging-wood buildings but somehow they all have similar green canvas awnings—was at one point considered hip, trendy, and cool, and the coolest restaurant was a Chili’s (RIP).
There’s this store that sells picture frames so diverse you could sell one to each different person in line at Tiffany’s. There are shapes, sizes, colors, made of all kinds of material, and it’s hard to remember a time when such a concept could support a whole store and yet it’s still here, one of the last of its kind remaining in a Downtown now overrun by Tiffany’s and Victoria’s Secret and Orange Theory and a place billing itself the Modern China Cafe. Things that were once unfamiliar but are now staples of my hometown.
I really shouldn’t get too sad about it. Stores are like people. They come and go.
I did not choose to be born in a suburb. I did not choose to designate suburbs as “safe.”
And yet here we are.
My hometown is a suburb, full of well-maintained public parks and lawns and there’s a large pond and a nice library and all the other signs of “safe” and people move here because it’s where you go to get away from the issues of the world.
One of these nice parks is Civic Park, which is a large grassy lawn carved up by walking paths, benches, a gazebo. It has been a wedding and then an ice-skating rink and a playground for children and a protest against presidents and a protest for lives wrongfully taken.
I would say that the protests are a recent addition, although the truth probably is that they are not. The issues that people try to get away from, they are here. They have always been here.
Sometimes there’s just enough money to cover it up.
Home is a hard thing to change. Home is the place we always want to go back to when the world gets hard. Which I guess is why home is a hard thing to change.
But one store changes and changing one store often changes another, and suddenly all of home starts to look different and you wonder how it changed one way and not some other way.
Home is like life. It’s full of tiny little changes and suddenly you wake up and it’s like nothing you remember.
Hidden away and nestled atop the huge parking garage of Broadway Plaza is a giant tent full of exercise bikes. It’s for one of those religious group exercise classes and they are like a religion.
There is no one there when I walk past in the year of covid, but I can see the ghosts of the riders pedaling in sync, sweating their calories and anxiety away while the coach extols them to breathe in the power of god, cast out the demons with your exhalation.
This “outdoor” exercise tent is questionable because what is outdoors when half the tent is covered up?
I have learned you should not ask questions of church. I suppose exercise church is probably the same.
For this past Christmas, I asked a friend what I should gift his partner.
“I don’t know,” he said, half-jokingly. “Maybe a gift card to the exercise church.”
I asked if I should really be enabling them.
“Yes, you should.”
There’s now a wine bar in Downtown, because bars have become so big in American culture that we can have niches for bars, including a wine bar.
I’ve had many fun interactions at this wine bar. An old former coworker who ended up in my hometown of all places. A date where we danced around whether or not we would actually be serious about our relationship. The couple really going at it as much as is publicly allowed, sticking their tongues down each other’s throats and heterosexuality down the rest of ours.
Next door is a brunch place where I eat with one of my mother’s best friends and where we both reminisce about my mom.
Next door to both the brunch place and the wine bar is the picture frame store.
It’s still there, and for how much longer, who knows.
One of Broadway Plaza’s most popular restaurants is P.F. Chang’s, and every time I walk by it, I hear an old college roommate (of Chinese descent) preaching to a third friend that his father is destroying Chinese culture by having created Panda Express.
It’s a part-joke, as all jokes are, vitamins covered in sugar or vegetables drenched in fat to fool kids (and adults) into eating nutrition by making the healthy parts more bearable, into accepting your opinions by covering them in jokes and masquerading them as facts.
Another friend (also of Chinese descent) once went on a tirade that it’s ridiculous and racist that Italians can charge twenty bucks for six pieces of ravioli but that we expect six dumplings to be a few bucks.
Sure, I suggest, you’re welcome to go to that three-Michelin star restaurant down the street selling dumplings for three-hundred bucks and then let’s talk.
“Hell no,” was the response.
I let that sink in.
There is a place called Din Tai Fung that does sell a bamboo basket of ten soup dumplings for fourteen-fifty (plus tax and tip other random price hikes because Din Tai Fung is also now a Michelin-starred restaurant) and you’ll still be hungry.
Their website features a film about “Artistry. Craftsmanship. Xiao Long Bao,” because thanks to direct-to-consumer companies every company has to have a wide-angled soliloquy about changing the world.
“Good, but it’s overpriced,” somebody says. Lots of somebody’s. This includes me.
I suppose this is a sign though that Chinese food has “made it,” whatever that means.
It’s funny what memories a random P.F. Chang’s can conjure up merely by existing.
I venture through Broadway Plaza and Downtown not because I like it, though it is interesting, but simply because I live next to it. And no, despite its convenience, I did not choose to live next to it, though I don’t necessarily judge someone who does.
“It’s why I bought this place,” says my landlord who is several, several years my senior.
He is balding, with wispy silver hair but a very-thick beard that will be scruffy when he bothers to shave it. In contrast, he wears Vans because it makes him young and hip like the Broadway Plaza he lives next to.
“Too bad I don’t have time to enjoy it though,” he adds with a pained, dramatic sigh.
I mean, you can, I tell him. But you’re always out working.
“I need to work,” he protests. “I have to save for retirement.”
Or you could just stop buying property.
“I need it as an investment. It’s for my retirement.”
I keep my mouth shut and hope the circular logic has naturally revealed itself.
I tag along and visit the-now-renovated Nordstrom with him one day to return a pair of shoes because he has one-hundred fifty-two pairs (an estimate, though not an exaggeration).
“I need a bigger place,” he says.
You don’t even spend any time at home enjoying the one you have, I counter.
“It’s true. Life is hard. Life is expensive.”
We stop by a restaurant for takeout because it’s Peruvian and Peruvian is one of my absolutely most favorite things in the world. We find some random table in Downtown and sit and eat, far from everybody else.
“This isn’t bad,” he says. “It’s like eating out. It’s so nice being here, we should do this more.”
I would agree but I’m too busy eating my Peruvian chicken.
I wonder what we look like to the rest of the world: a sixty-year-old white man and a thirty-something Asian boy, and in his eyes I am but a boy, which makes me feel great and not like the old grump that I sometimes feel when I encounter teenagers or twenty-somethings outside a Victoria’s Secret. Although I suppose self-esteem is only a few blocks away in the weirdly-age-diverse crowd lining up for Tiffany’s.
But nevertheless here we are, two roommates eating Peruvian in Downtown occupying a random outdoor table not far from where McDonald’s used to be, not far from where the P.F. Chang’s now is, not far from where the picture frame store is now, and not far from where the picture frame store will one day used to be.