“When I was back there in seminary school….”

Oh, wait, wrong opening.

When I was a young dad, we rented a house in Bearsville, NY every summer. It was a cute little house on Pond Road, just off Wittenberg Road in Ulster County.

There, me, my wife and little son would frolic all summer. We’d fish in the Ashokan Reservoir. We’d swim in Wilson State Park. We’d eat huge pancakes at Sweet Sue’s in Phoenicia, and cook out in the backyard, and play with the neighbor, Doug, and his wife and kids and their doggie, Tio. Doug was a contractor and the kids were allowed to climb all over the heavy equipment, even the skidder.

We would take our son to Wonder Works on 375, where an amazing playground/fortress of wood decking material offered safe ways for him to climb, jump, play with other kids, and generally exhaust himself in the fresh air.

On crappy days, we’d have breakfast, play some rummy, and then agree: “MALL DAY!!!” We’d drive east on 28, and then head north, up to the Hudson Valley Mall. For a Brooklyn family, everything about the area was a novelty, from playing outdoors without a care, to shopping in big box stores, to walking around a real mall.

There was a multiplex with big seats and no gum on the floor, unlike the Plaza Twin on Flatbush, which was totally shkeevatz, albeit nearby. There was Sears. There was a food court. There was an arcade. SKEEBALL!!!! My son would roll doody-brown balls into little target-holes and, for his efforts, win hundreds of little paper tickets that he eagerly traded for wonderful prizes, like a big fat pencil with a cartoony large eraser. Such treasures!

Last week, my wife and I rented a lovely place near Cooper Lake, about three miles from our old summertime property. We celebrated our anniversary, had wonderful dinners out, swam in North/South Lake, barbecued and, when the weather got crappy, we looked at each other and said: “MALL DAY!!!”

We drove to the Hudson Valley Mall, expecting to relive those halcyon days of our child-rearing past.

Well, it wasn’t like it was “when I was back there in seminary school…” We’d never been to a dead mail before. Wow! There was a HUGE empty parking lot populated only by a fat young guy in trucker hat and sloppy shorts pulling a mule-train of shopping carts back to Target (pronounced Tar-JHAY by us sophisticated downstate New Yorkers), where one could buy everything from ice cream to hand towels ($2.50! All-cotton! Huzzah!)

But there was a behemoth — Sears — stripped of its signage, crabgrass growing on its front sidewalk, like a Mad Max or Escape From New York backlot set.

We expected to find a natty Rod Serling with Brylcreemed hair in front of those doors, holding a lit Lucky and intoning, “You are about to enter another dimension…a journey not only of sight and sound, but of mind…submitted for your approval, the end game of post-Covid, rogue capitalism gone awry…a hard lesson to be learned…in The Twilight Zone.”

Target was still doing business. There was a Dick’s Sporting Goods. And there was the multiplex.

It was raining, so we went to the movies. Whoa. It was recently redecorated. Fancy, even. But so so empty. We asked the quartet of thumb-twiddling theater workers if the place was open. They nodded yes and we selected non-reclining seats for Deadpool and Wolverine. I noticed no other seats selected by other patrons when we chose our location on the check-in screen.

We ordered the medium popcorn. Medium! Ha! It was as big as a five-bottle wine bucket. A series of ads for local businesses — carpenters, dentists, realtors — ran, too loudly, and portrayed men and women in very uncool haircuts and apparel.

Some other patrons filed in to the enormous theater number two. The coming attractions offered a parade of action-adventure pictures. Lots of explosions and VFX.

I’m not an action adventure movie type, and I am not a Marvel aficionado. BUT: “Deadpool and Wolverine” was AMAZEBALLS. It was witty as a mofo, and the casting, cameos, dialogue, and SFX all served the entertainment. The ten or so patrons in #2 all laughed at the throwaway lines and myriad inside-baseball cultural references.

I loved it.

Maybe there is hope for us in our post-Covid, post-brick and mortar retail world. Maybe we’ll survive without H&Ms, and Sears, and crappy mall Asian and Italian food.

Maybe it’s really all about finding joy where you can get it, like finding salamanders on ferns after the summer rain, or helping grandma catch a big bass in the Ashokan, or playing soccer with your little son in the beautiful Boiceville high school field. Laughing your head off at a big-budget, funny as hell, blockbuster summer movie.

Or…sharing a smile, a tiny moment of joy, with the woman at an Interstate rest stop Starbucks who wore a sweatshirt that read: “My vice president is a black woman”.

She caught my gaze. “You may have to update that shirt in November,” I whispered.

“Thank you,” she said, with a wink.

So: “Submitted for your approval…a couple in (very) late middle age wander into the now-deserted mall of their memory, only to discover that there is still hope, and joy to be found, nurtured, and, yes, savored…even in the farthest reaches of The Twilight Zone…”