Without The Store: A Memoir and Short Description of My Employment at BWC and it's parking lot
I can remember quite clearly even now, though it was like at least eight years ago, and due to the swift passage of time recently, it feels like it was a thousand years ago...either that or just yesterday, or somehow, though it is temporally and physically impossible, both; anyway, though, I remember working at BJ's Wholesale Club in Portsmouth, NH, and coming out at night, to clean up and organize the white-roofed, Quonset hut-like cart corrals that dotted the vast black expanse of the parking lot. I remember all that, and the purplish-orangish, black hues suffusing the sky...seeming both marvelous beyond mortal comprehension, and terrifically ominous, filled with a sinister purpose. Yet, rarely did anything negative or ominous happen. There was one time when an eerie thing occurred, but as that is not the primary subject of this piece, I will not broach it any further here. Often, when walking our through the red-painted steel sliding glass doors at the front of the vast warehouselike building, I would see the colorful glory of the nighttime sky, spread out before me, like a vast galactic tapestry, a sidereal portrait, complete with the purpleness and the orangeness that suggested nebular dust...yet the nearest nebula was tens of dozens of parsecs away at the very least. It was the suggestion, the imitation, the resemblance of nebular dust, not the very real embodiment of it. I would have had to have been a space explorer to have witnessed such a sight as a nebula...and given the ludicrous spatial/linear limitations of the current space program, I doubt I would even have ever glimpsed one with the naked eye even then. Yet I digress. Moisture was often in the air at night, in the summer and in the autumn, and this moisture, this dew communicated itself to the entire parking lot, settling stubbornly on everything, even the vast black asphalted plains, making it appear more often than not that it had rained just a few moments before I had clocked out. And I remember that, too. An interesting bit of history concerning myself and the clocks that I used at the various establishments and mercantiles that I worked at: I always had a problem with them. Even at my new job, about which I am not yet going to mention anything, I am having problems with the clocking out device and general system itself. We always have a wretched rapport, the timeclocks and I. Yet again, I digress. At the time of my stint at BJ's Wholesale Club, I did not have a car nor yet a license, utterly despite the advancement of my age...the fact that I was 17, 18 & 19. So, often I had to await my mother's or my sister's oft-late arrival. Yes, truly, both were frequently tardy...or so it seemed to me, sitting alongside the vast, cold cement curb that fringed the building. Sitting there, intimidated, that great, labyrinthine, gargantuan building at my back; like sitting with your back to a vast white elephant...and one you didn't entirely trust to not break free of it's bounds and stampede you. I did not want to become edematous jelly of some sort...so I always sat as close to the road and as far from the facade of the huge building as I could. A wise move, I always thought. Yet, in a way, I was wrong, for if it was a fundamental fear of the animation and movement of the building and it destroying me that kept me far from it, then I was in error...for of course, that building would never swallow me up or stomp on me...right? Yet there was little cryptic, other than the emptiness and the inborn, unconscious eerieness of the night, at that place. True, all was deserted, all was devoid of almost every last trace of human life and activity, but while it may have been as silent as a grave and as dark as an unlit tomb, it was not so dank nor malodorous nor dangerous and ominous as those things. It was a little piece of dark, ominous, but ultimately harmless heaven. But often, only at night. Though some Sundays in the summer when I got out at 7:00 pm and the parking lot was gilded with overmuch yellowish sunlight, the breezes blew no tumbleweed nor threat nor rumor of destruction, but rather happiness and vernal glory in their wake, and when the birds sang and all was sweetness and light, that was also a little piece of heaven on earth, I suppose...as was the instant that I espied the multi-hued, pastel, trailing arch of that rainbow that one Sunday or Monday in May, but that is another story for another time (and probably isn't all that exciting anyway! lol)-I never thought I'd ever end a story or entry with that particular abbreviation! Oh, well. WDID.
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