The other day I was in my very old-school grocery story, Key Food, where I have been shopping since 1990.
Key Food will be gone at some point, making way for a spiffier, up-to-date model because the site has been sold to a developer. To say I will miss it does not begin to address my feelings on the issue.
Key Food was where my husband and I shopped when we were still unmarried and living in our first rental apartment together. Then we shopped there as a married couple and continued to do so when we became parents and bought our house around the corner.
It is the very old school-ness of Key Food that I have always loved. It has the feel of stores like Grand Union, Bohack’s and A&P that my family shopped in when I was little. Key Food also plays great music. But it was the community of the place that really struck me.
Case in point: “ ‘Shame on you,’ my mother used to say, ‘if you don’t prepare for a coming snow storm.’ What is wrong with these people?!” Delio, a former store manager, once recounted as he watched hoards of shoppers coming in to stock up before a storm.
Case in point, two: “What is wrong with you?” Bob, another former store manager, once chided me when I told him I hadn’t been in the store for days because I had a sick child at home. “Why didn’t you call me. I would deliver!”
This week, I was passing the shampoo shelf and was stopped in my tracks by a bright red bottle of Clairol Herbal Essence. I simply had to have it. I almost took the bottle off the shelf when I managed to gather myself. Why in God’s name did I need a bottle of Clairol Herbal Essence? Did I need my hair to smell like I was in middle school?
Thankfully, I kept walking. Just at that point, though, I realized they were playing Saturday In The Park by Chicago. So, there I was drawn back to the mid-‘70s because of a bottle of shampoo and a song, whose lyrics were about, among other things, the Fourth of July. You know, that very cheerful feeling of mid-summer, the antidote to an endless pandemic and dirty snow and garbage-covered streets of New York.
At this point, I was standing on line when a man of a certain age wearing an MTA uniform walked by me, singing, rather loudly I might add, the lyrics to the aforementioned song. Now I know, perhaps, the first line but this individual knew every word of the intro, melody, chorus, and bridge. A mere weeks before Key Food was playing Lara’s theme, from Doctor Zhivago. Only they were airing the ultra-cheesy Ray Coniff Muzak version, not the fabulous Maurice Jarre one from the soundtrack.
And, accompanying this, was one of the female managers, loudly singing “Somewhere my love…” as she moved around the front of the store.