Oh, the thrill of a dollar.
Each Saturday, I’d get a dollar for allowance, and my best friend and I would rush out to spend it, and have a grand ole’ time.
I was the daughter of a struggling single mother, and times were tight, so a dollar was nothing to scoff at but rather be appreciated. Kim’s situation was no better, in its own way, so she appreciated that dollar, too.
We’d walk to the closest convenience store and buy a Diet Pepsi in a tall glass bottle and a Nestle Crunch bar, total cost, 50 cents. We’d break the Nestle Crunch bar in half: half for her, half for me; and we’d pass the soda back and forth between us.
Then the fun would begin. We’d go over to the video games. There were two: Ms Pacman and Galaga. For the remaining 50 cents, we’d get a two-person game that we relished, and it was nearly always Ms Pacman.
We tried Galaga, an outer space shooting game, once or twice, for some variety, but it was a major waste of money and fun. On video games, when you were a new player your game would end pretty quickly, because your token would get killed off. Only after much playing and getting good at it could you last a decent amount of time – 50 cents worth of time. On any game other than Mc Pacman, we’d lose our tokens and our game would be over so quickly that our heads would spin over where that 50 cents had gone.
Meanwhile, at school, we were not the cool kids in a clique, but we had such a wonderful friendship that life was beautiful; and that rich friendship has lasted strong now across four decades.
The coolest of the cool kids was named Susan, a queen bee surrounded by her high-haired minions. Susan and all her friends had all the latest 1980s fashions, down to the belts and the pocketbooks and the shoes, jellies one year, espadrilles another, straps-up-the-calves the next.
It would have been enough if she just stayed beautiful and rich, but she had to add something to that mix: cruelty to others.
Susan would scoff at Kim and my pitiful outfits and hairdos, and her cronies would laugh.
One day, I learned that Susan’s father owned that convenience store (which also was a gas station) we went to every Saturday, and the others of the same name in our tiny town.
Our dollars, a week at a time, were going toward the clothing, shoes and belts Susan wore to lord it all over the rest of us.
Well – no more!
There was no way we were going to support Susan’s sense of entitlement, bossiness and cruelty, not to mention her amazing wardrobe, with one more cent. That was the end of our Ms Pacman Saturdays.
In fact, that was the start of a boycott of that convenience store that lasted decades. I steadfastly kept away from that chain of stores which were on practically every major intersection no matter how convenient or appropriate it would have been for me to go there. I went way out of my way to get gas at other places.
Eventually my boycott became so automatic that I could not remember the reason for it. One day about 20 years later it occured to me to wonder: Why do I go out of my way to get gas at other gas stations? Why do I hate this store so much?
The reason just randomly occured to me a few years after that.
We stuck to our principles, and we perhaps didn’t miss out too much on giving up those Ms Pacman games after all. It wasn’t long after that that we were earning our own money by babysitting and such, and instead of having just a dollar to spend, we’d walk into town where we could buy clothes at the Farmers Alliance and Moore’s and Belk.
Eventually, we, too, became cool looking, even if our version of that was buying the clothes that were on sale – and in styles that looked good on both of us, so we could share.
We don’t share clothes anymore, but oh, the stories we still share, and that our daughters actually want to hear, and that is the grandest richness of all.
