1999 marked the beginning of the end for mall culture.
I should know. I grew up as a teenage girl in its heyday.
I still remember the Britney Spears poster displayed in the window of the record store, and the glitter eyeshadow at Claire’s. My sign-language class performed Frosty the Snowman on the mall stage during the holidays (Fun fact: to this day, I can still sign the entire lyrics to that song). When I was 14, our girl scout troop did an overnight sleepover at the mall with hundreds of other lucky teenage girls. These were the years that people did their holiday shopping at KB Toys. Beanie babies went like hotcakes when they were in stock at the Hallmark store. Hot Topic catered to your inner goth, the arcade never had an empty game and the food court was always bustling.
Heck, my high school even held our senior prom at the mall.
After I graduated in 1998 and started college, I got a job working at the mall, at a now-defunct clothing store called County Seat.
County seat sold mainly jeans, along with a smattering of other 90’s staples like chunky sweaters, plaid pants, and t-shirts.
I enjoyed working there for a number of months until, in 1999, County Seat filed bankruptcy.
This is the era when the internet was changing from this thing that made a weird noise on your computer and then loaded pictures really slowly, to a thing with “chat rooms” (assuming they didn’t all crash during Y2K).
Teenagers were starting to connect on these “chat rooms.” Not only was the conversation space of the American teenager shifting online, but so was the shopping space. To the 80’s and 90’s teenager, the mall represented a place that was fully their own: a social sphere where they could gather and be themselves in whatever fashion they wanted to invent. But as the new millennia approached, that sphere was shifting online. Malls began dying out, the most notorious of which was the Glendale Galleria, which closed its doors in 1999. Although online shopping was still in its infancy, it marked the start of a trend that has only grown and multiplied in the years since. County Seat was one of its early casualties.
Fast forward to January 2009. This internet thing has really taken off and I’ve finally gotten myself a Facebook account. I receive a friend request from my former manager at County Seat. Although we hadn’t stayed in touch after the store closed, I’d always admired her and was curious to see what she was up to in her life. I accepted.
More time passes. I follow the goings-on in her life through her Facebook posts, but other than a few brief interactions, we haven’t really talked.
And by “more time passes” I mean another decade. The little four-year-old she’d sometimes bring by the clothing store? Now a grown adult with a four-year-old of her own.
And then we decide to take a family vacation to Florida, exactly 10 years to the day after that first Facebook friend request. On a whim, I look up our destination to see how close it is to my former manager. It’s only about an hour away.
I message her, suggest we try to meet up. Told her she should bring the family and the grandkids along, too.
She agrees.
AND WE ACTUALLY GET TOGETHER WITH ALL OUR EXTENDED FAMILY AFTER 20 YEARS AND IT’S LIKE WE’RE ALL BEST FRIENDS SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME.
No, seriously, I randomly invited a woman I hadn’t met with in over two decades to meet my in-laws and not only did she show up but she brought all her family AND DINNER and ON TOP OF ALL THAT everyone got along, the kids played, the adults chatted comfortably, and the food was fantastic.
As she said herself, “it’s the little things that are the big things.” Something simple can be amazing and wonderful, too.
But this story also showcases something important about my personality. I’m not big on details. I plan things on a wing and a prayer and hope they all work out for the best. I’m a glass-half-full kind of gal that way. And so far, in my life, I’ve been very, very blessed with this strategy.
And as much as it aggravates my Type-A, organized, planner of a husband to no end, if I didn’t accept crazy ideas on a whim, I would have never agreed to our first date. And where would we be then?
So, here’s to many more years of spontaneous ziti dinners with friends, first dates in Iowa, and who-knows-what-next.
