Morning At the Mall, Part 1

If you go to the Towne Square Mall before the stores open—and I can’t think why you would—you’ll likely find what I found there last Monday. I don’t usually go before the stores open. I don’t usually go at all, but I did that day, Martin Luther King Day, which thing I forgot until I got to the credit union, found it closed and knew then that the Post Office would be closed, too. Duh. It's on all my calendars.

So I headed for the mall. I would pass the time, do some walking, until J C Penney’s opened and I could return the shoes that don’t fit.

What I found when I got there was a nice little sub-culture.

I entered the mall. Two women—water bottles in hand, sweatshirts tied around their waists—came toward me, then made a U-turn and headed away from me. Serious walkers. I could see that, but I stopped them anyway.

“Do you walk every day?” I asked.

They answered in chorus, “Yes.”

“Do you know the distance?” not that I needed to know, but I could see they liked being asked, and I am a nice, friendly person. Usually.

“It’s about a mile, upstairs and downstairs,” said the older one, “a little more if you take all the side corridors.”

“Both floors together make a mile?” I asked.

“No. Each floor is a mile.”

“Cool,” I said, wishing I had chosen just about any other word, and they were off.

I followed but couldn’t keep up. I didn’t expect to. I’m kind of out of shape. I determined, though, that I would walk the upstairs, then go down and walk the downstairs. I could surely do that in the 25 minutes before Penney’s opened. And I did.

I was not alone.

I mean, I expected to see walkers here and there, but the place was crawling with them, so to speak, not that I counted. But, trust me, there were a lot of people walking the mall, and there were divisions of them, too. That is, the sub-culture had sub-groups.

All of this is neither startling, I suppose, nor world-shaking, but I found it fascinating, a look into life in Boise, Idaho. At least life at the mall in the mornings.