At the Groc

 In the beginning there was Home, and Grandma and Grandpa's House, and also the other Grandma and Grandpa's house---with neither set taking precedence, and both being very different places.  When the world comes into focus I am three or four years old.

There was Church, which for our case was two different places as well---the little one, St. David's, and the big one, St. John's, sometimes one and sometimes the other. 

There was The Store---the grocery store. When I was four all of these places besides Home were accessible only by car. 

There were other places too, visited less frequently. There was the Bank, which was Downtown on Main Street, in a classic architectural building. One walked inside off the street, up stone steps. Inside was a high ceiling room with a stone counter where my mother would stand. I could not yet see over the counter. It must have stressful for my mother to go there, because money was always a stressful thing. Likewise there was the Library too, and that was fun or stressful at times, because there were typically fines that had to be paid, for us to take out books. There was always a price to be paid for everything in the world. As a child I could just walk, which was free, and to this day walking is the most freeing thing in the world.

The Store--the grocery store, could be a different place depending on who was going to the store. When I was three or four, we lived in a duplex on Ferndale and then moved the next year to Melrose, just one block over. The store was Randall's, a supermarket with bright lights. Even though it was close-by, just three blocks away,  it turns out, and when I was old enough I discovered how close it was, to walk to it on the sidewalks. But it was still across a busy street which was scary, and the parking lot meant you were supposed to go by car. 

But the street was not that busy after all---only busy to a small child. In later years it seemed like a very calm narrow street, and I could go there on my own, or with a bicycle.

Grandma Kate, my mom's mother, also went to Randall's, and she called it Randall's to distinguish it from the older and smaller grocery store across Grand Avenue, which was the busy street that led out north of town. I was not allowed to cross Grand Avenue. No one ever told me, but I knew it was too big of street to cross when I was little.

The other grocery was "old time". It had a low ceiling and was brick. Ames Fruit and Grocery, it was called.   In those days, the 1960s, old time was bad and new was good, like the big brightly lit Randall's. But even then I had developed a fascination for the old time, and had nostalgia for things from before I was born. I liked having both. I felt like as a new model of person, I could be at home in both in a way that older people like my grandparents could not. To them the old time was the normal and the new was truly new, like me.

The sign on Ames Fruit and Grocery abbreviated the word grocery as "Groc." From this*, my mother, in her never-ceasing games of word play, called any grocery store, including Randalls, as the "Groc", pronounced with a hard c at the end. We rarely went there after Randall's was built as a modern supermarket. Likewise my maternal grandparents switched over to Randall's as well, because it was it new and bigger and that was good.

I remember the old time Groc had automatic days that would open when one stepped on a black mat. Before he passed away, my father told me a story about Ames Fruit and Grocery from when I was a toddler. He had gone for something---an errand, that's what we called them---going on an "errand" to The Store. He finished and going outside. He was carrying me and I was looking backwards as he passed through the doors. 

Spontaneously I started saying "too-oh! Look dad, it says too-oh!". He turned around very puzzled. What on earth did I mean? Had I heard something?  kept insisting that something said "too-oh." 

Finally he realized that I was actually reading the sign on the door. It was the sign that said "OUT" but it was backwards from where I saw it, like "TUO." At that point he knew his son was not a normal child.

Ames Fruit & Grocery, which at the north end of town just off Grand Avenue. I had thought this was the origin of "Groc" (see * below). Perhaps it comes form my mom's own childhood. It was one of several grocery stores in the area owned by Abe Mezvinsky. (Grandpa Don called it "Abe's" because of that. That confused me because it sounded like "Ames"). One of the few prominent Jews in Ames, Abe Mezvinsky was born in the Ukraine and came to the US as penniless immigrant.  His son became a Congressman representing Central Iowa and his grandson is married to Bill Clinton's daughter.

(source) The new Randall's in 1967. It had opened the year before according to the source article, so it indeed was the "new groc" when I was a toddler. Seeing those triangular shapes on the roof brought me right back, as well as the single-letter signs. Having all the cars look like that seems normal to me. In the 1990s when I was living in Austin, Texas, the Safeway nearby to my house became a Randall's, and I assumed it was the same chain. It gave me a strange feeling of continuity to my life. But I learned a little while ago the Texas version of Randall's is completely separate. The old central Iowa Randall's chain ceased to exist decades ago.