The Bench

It was just a bench. And not an attractive one.

Recently, in the name of progress, a long-standing strip shopping center, Belle Meade Plaza, was torn down here in Nashville. A new commercial development is to be built in that prime spot. Gone is the grocery store in my parents’ neighborhood; wiped away by the bulldozer are the small storefronts that housed so many mom and pop shops through the years.

And gone is my bench.

In my childhood, I recall that strip center housing the city’s finest ladies’ and men’s apparel shops (Leon’s and Everett Holzapfel’s). There was a small, intimate bookstore (Mills) and the type of cafeteria (Belle Meade Cafeteria) that was a hallmark of dining out in the 1970s. A small department store, Kuhn’s, was one of the anchors. Because the shopping center was relatively close to my grandmother’s house, we would often go there in the afternoons after she picked me up from school—or on days when she was babysitting me. I remember skipping along beside her as she picked up meat from Schwartz’s delicatessen, dropped off her shoes at Model Shoe Rebuilders, and went into Cooper-Martin Supermarket to buy her groceries. I recall begging her to stop in and smell the lilies and roses at Embassy Flowers.

I never enjoyed running errands with my mom. They were an imposition to my day, as I was anxious to get home and play. But I loved errand afternoons at Belle Meade Plaza with my grandmother, probably because her pace was so leisurely. I loved hearing the chatter between her and Mr. Schwartz, or the owner of the shoe repair shop. To my small world, it seemed my grandmother knew everyone and everyone knew her. She appreciated my pristine manners, so I made sure they were on full display, and she would prattle on about me as if I was the most exceptional child in the world.

On those afternoons, I came to believe it.

At one part of the strip center, some of the shops were recessed to create a covered courtyard of sorts. And bolted to the concrete was my bench. Inevitably, after a few errands, I would tire and ask to sit—usually with a Push-Up frozen treat. There we would rest for a few minutes, watching the people go by. Perhaps it was the writer in me, but I loved to people watch. My grandmother and I played a game, guessing which store shoppers would enter. We guessed about their lives and their dispositions. There was a wrought iron staircase down to a basement level, and I fantasized about what might be housed down there.

One summer day as we were sitting, a sudden rainstorm came up. We stayed dry on the bench, protected by the courtyard roof.

“I don’t want to get my shoes wet,” my grandmother lamented.

“Maybe there will be a rainbow though,” I said.

She smiled, probably because she knew then what I know now: that children possess an optimistic perspective that so often fades with adulthood.

I intuited that if I said I was tired, I would get an ice cream cone or treat and get to sit for a while. It seemed from my vantage point on that bench that life held limitless possibilities as well as infinite time. I couldn’t fathom that life would march on until today when I am only 10 years younger than my grandmother was when she died. I couldn’t imagine the incredible impact of time—in ways both joyful and sorrowful—on my life. My whole world view was as confined, as hopeful, as protected as we were from the rain shower.

I completely understand that the shopping center, built in 1961, was outdated. From what I hear, there were problems with much of its infrastructure. Even the bench’s hard metal had corroded in places. Yet I find myself mourning that shopping center’s demolition not because of a contempt for progress but because it’s one more erosion of my history. Until it closed, I would still frequent that shopping center—turning over through the years with new tenants—and, every now and then, pause and sit on the bench. About a year ago I noticed a young woman resting on the bench, texting on her iPhone. What generational changes that metal bench has seen.

But although that woman probably gave it no thought, that bench meant something to me. You see, amidst the busyness and daily vicissitudes of life, whenever I visited it, the bench offered me the opportunity to rest, to people watch, to let my mind wander back and visit with the ghosts of people who loved me, who formed me.

Do we ever get too old to need to reconnect with the child we once were? To feel extraordinary if only because someone four times your size and ten times your age says so? As architecture evolves and cityscapes change, it is only inevitable that we feel a shuttering of parts of our adolescence. Do we ever outgrow the yearning for those childhood memories, ever more fleeting as we age, that anchor us in who and whose we are?

As ridiculous as it sounds, I grieve the loss of that bench. You see, there are days I need to revisit the little girl waiting out a rainstorm. Hoping for a rainbow.

It was never just a bench.