Late December Saturday
It hadn't snowed in the last few days, but it had been cold. The temperatures recently had been hard pressed to exceed 20 degrees on any day and that had only been by a degree or two. I slipped into my old Toyota that Tuesday afternoon, cranked the engine and started my commute up the road toward my place of work. I was glad that the snow was gone for the moment and that the roads were again easy to drive, albeit coated with the salt rime that was common on Ohio roads in the wintertime. I pushed a cassette tape into the car's player as I started my drive, anxious to hear the last chapter or two in the talking book I'd been listening to for the past week. It was a thriller and the most exciting part was just beginning to unfold. There was this girl, you see, and she had went and... Well, I won't go into it right now. Suffice it to say that she was in big, big trouble and I was extremely curious to see if she was going to get out of it. Or not. Most of the time in most of these kind of books the protagonist or co-protagonist does escape. You expect it and enjoy discovering how the author manages to save him or her. But once in a while you get surprised and the character meets their doom. It always keeps you on your toes while you read one of these books to try to figure out if it was one of those kind.
I was rooting that it wasn't.
About the half-way point on my ride to work the talking book finished and I placed the tape back in its container. I was smiling, so you can probably guess which way the ending of the book went, can't you? But instead of starting another talking book right then and there, I decided to instead just relax a bit and enjoy the rest of the ride. As I motored along I thought about the just-past weekend and the drive my wife and I had taken on that Saturday.
To set the stage for the ride on Saturday you need to know a certain fact. And that is that the week before, we had received a Christmas card from my sister-in-law in California. In it she had included, as presents for us, a CD containing Christmas music and also a gift certificate for a box of chocolates. The candy the certificate was for was made by a company named See's Chocolates which is well-known throughout the western United States and is based in Los Angeles. I considered it a bit odd to receive a certificate for something that was difficult to obtain where I lived, but took it as a small eccentricity of the lady who sent it. Her heart was always in the right place but her head was probably a bit California-centric. So, to figure out how to get our candy I looked online to see if there was anyplace within a day's drive where I could redeem the certificate. I soon found out that the closest outlet for See's Candy was a seasonal kiosk at Beachwood Place Mall in Beachwood, Ohio. We'd considered sending the certificate to my brother in California and not trying to redeem it locally, but finally decided that, since the weather on Saturday was fine, we'd just take a drive up there and redeem it ourselves.
So Saturday afternoon after grocery shopping we hopped into the Honda and pointed ourselves north by northeast. The weather was nice – sunny, dry and cold. Easy driving. We chit-chatted as the miles went by and soon found ourselves in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland on Cedar Road just off I-271 and about a half-mile from the mall. We looked ahead and saw a line of cars waiting to make the left turn into the mall parking lot and realized that an appreciable percentage of Cleveland's population had decided to do the same thing! Of course it was the last weekend before Christmas and I guess a lot of people weren't quite done with their holiday shopping.
After several changes of the traffic light we finally made the left turn into the parking lot and found a spot to put the car. It was a bit of a hike to the main entrance of the mall, so we entered from one of the closer anchor stores which happened to be Saks Fifth Avenue. We enjoyed looking at the Christmas decorations and the shoppers scurrying about in this upscale department store. One sight caught my eye as we were passing through the cosmetic department. One of the cosmetic counter girls was applying some makeup to a customer as we were passing. The counter girl was striking – about 6'2”, slender as a whip, dressed in black top, black tights and black miniskirt. She looked as if she'd just stepped out of the pages of Cosmo or Elle or some such glamor magazine.
But of course I wasn't REALLY paying THAT much attention!
We found the kiosk after making a few wrong turns and redeemed our certificate for a box of mixed chocolates. After wandering around the mall for a while doing some window shopping and being looked down upon by the snooty shop girls and guys, we found ourselves in the food court. We peeked into the various food vendors and decided that none of it looked terribly appetizing at the moment. I made a suggestion to my wife that we might stop at a Mexican restaurant for a late lunch close to where I used to work in Twinsburg. It wasn't too far off the route home and she agreed that it sounded OK to her.
We left the crowded mall through Saks again and, before going out the door I stopped my wife and pointed to a display of purses. “I wonder what these guys cost?” I said to her.
She shrugged, so I picked up a little one, about the size you could put a couple big apples in and casually glanced at the tag. Of course it was either a Gucci or a Coach or something like that. The tag said $490. I carefully placed it back on the table and tiptoed out of there wondering at the kind of people who could drop 5 C-notes on a teeny purse.
Definitely no one I was familiar with.
We found our car out in the north 40 acres of the parking lot and headed down I-271 and I-480 until exiting at one of the Twinsburg exits. I decided, since we were in the neighborhood, to take a look at the office where I used to work before being “downsized” back in 2001. It was still there and the sign on the front still said 2000 Highland Road, but the company name was Verizon now instead of Alltel. We drove through the parking lot and noticed a very large addition being built onto the rear of the building. Several stories high and appeared to be the area of several football fields. It appeared to me that the depression in the economy wasn't being felt too much at that office. I left the parking lot feeling strangely disoriented. I'd spent the better part of 20 years there and the place felt as foreign to me as the dark side of the moon. It looked very much the same as it did before but it felt strange and cold. There was nothing there that felt warm or welcoming anymore.
We ate our late lunches at Marcellitas and they were good; as good as I'd remembered them being. We took the longer, more scenic route home from there, driving through Hudson on Darrow Road, turning west from there on 303 and going through the Cuyahoga National Park and Peninsula Village before hitting I-271 again and following it to its terminus at I-71. Then south on that interstate until Burbank, Ohio Rt. 83 and back home in the early dark of a late December day, the stars shining down from a frigid sky.
Seeing the old places where I had worked and spent those many years was bittersweet. A considerable portion of my life had been spent traveling those roads, eating in those restaurants and working in those now melancholy feeling offices. I remembered old friends and old enemies, bosses I loved to death and ones I considered monsters in human form. I remembered the weather I experienced making that long commute over the decades, the warm spring nights, the booming thunderstorms that sizzled in my path. And of course I remembered the black ice nights, the near-blizzard drives where my knuckles were whiter on the steering wheel than the snow flying by out the windshield. I remembered the near half-million miles I spent going to and from the place.
But mostly I remembered the many friends who I had to leave when I was so unceremoniously ejected from the life I had grown so used to over the years. The guys and girls who I'd shared the years with.
I thought about them on the long drive home, the ones I still keep in contact with and the ones who've dropped completely off my radar. Of course I've made other friends since then, many of them as close as the ones I had in my Alltel years. But there will always be a place in my heart for the folks who were with me on the long ride through the various incarnations of Alltel, from my first days with Mid-Continent Telephone, through Systematics and the period of merger and becoming Alltel.
And for all those friends from the past, the Mikes and Marys, the Freds and Susans, the Daves and Michelles, the Hermans and the Ottos and all the rest, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year.
May you remember our good times together with as much joy as I do.
