Would anybody like to discuss why old stores interest them?

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BeerIsGod

Post by BeerIsGod »

This whole nostalgia thing is not just confined to grocery stores, even though they are a huge part of it. I walk around old shopping centers after work sometimes. When the old Macy's at Cumberland Mall in Smyrna, GA was demolished last year for an updated market entrance to the mall, something inside me sort of died. The old landmarks of my youth are disappearing. Part of my career has been building and remodelling old homes. I enjoy walking into an old home that a young couple has just purchased from an old couple who has lived there for 50 years. The young couple wants to update the old place, and I'm happy to be a part of it. For a while, though, I can actually feel the presence of the old couple who lived there for so many years. Their family memories, discussions, meals and everyday life still hang in the air. It's different with some old homes. In some, there are very few feelings in the air, or perhaps a negative vibe that sort of hangs like Spanish moss. In others, I can feel the upbeat optimism of the generation who had just won WWII and had come back to settle down and do some real living in the American way of life. Everyting was in front of them, and most of those in suburbia took the ball and ran with it, to raise strong families and then fade into the background as they handed the reins of the world to their own children. I'm one of those children. I'll be 50 this year, and the older I get, the more I understand the importance of the past, and the more that I can feel those "memories" hanging in the air in many places. It's like spirits who are whispering, "Just because the 50s' and 60's are over, don't think that we are gone. Many of us still inhabit these places." If you quiet your mind and concentrate, you can still hear them.
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