The Sev and the square

This blog recently had an anniversary. Sort of. 

It's been 35 years since the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in China that resulted in one of the most indelible images in history: a young man stands in front of a tank advancing into Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

He didn't hesitate, nor did he move out of the way. He carried what looked like shopping bags in each  hand, as if he'd stopped at the store for bread and milk on the way to risking his life. No one knows what happened to him after he was whisked away by authorities. He has never been positively identified, except to be dubbed Tank Man. 

Some of you who are regular readers may have already guessed where I'm going with this. Tiananmen Square became part of my mother's vernacular, a place where good, solid words go to wither and die.  

"I want to go to Tiramisu Square," she told me.

I could have given this blog a different name derived from the list of mom's malaprops, something like Netflick, which sounds like an insect trap, or COVIC, which sounds like a CIA code name. Sleep apathy was definitely out of the question. So was Meryl Street.

But mom twists and bends the language so often, you need the vastness of a Tiramisu Square to contain it. It's where a word salad becomes alphabet soup.

I experienced another milestone of sorts recently when the convenience store literally around the corner from where I grew up closed forever. The 7-11 - or Sev as we called it  - was the repository of Tastykakes, Slurpees and the occasional loaf of Wonder Bread. (While my father worked for Stroehmann Bread, he often forget to bring a free loaf home.) 

I can still see the inside of it, back to when the shelves were accessible to short, little arms. And the sound of glass bottles cascading into a dumpster - the Sev backed up to our rear yard -  still gives me a  warm feeling of remembrance.

When people and things from your childhood disappear, you grieve the way you didn't as a youngster, when you were too busy navigating life to notice. But memory has its own version of history. So you simply have to make a stop at the boarded-up 7-11, already bereft of its familiar orange, red and green striping. 

Somehow you think there might be left more than old shelves turned to dust. And, sorry, the dumpster is long gone.  

On the same day as that trip back into time, my mother had to visit her bank, the place where she opened our childhood accounts starting in the '60s and squeezed savings out of my father's very average paycheck despite feeding and caring for five kids.

That bank is also expected to close soon, just when mom was getting used to the loss of tellers behind the counter. The ATM makes her nervous: Slipping her money into a machine and wondering where it goes is intimidating. 

She'll likely continue to protest such changes, as if she could slow the march toward an inevitable future. Kind of like the guy in front of the tank.   

In Tiramisu Square.