Grocery Stores

My favorite grocery store in Murfreesboro is one that I do not go to very often. It is Jr.'s Foodland on Main Street. It is one of those old fashioned stores that are rapidly disappearing from our foodscape.

When you go to Jr.'s, you are going for groceries only. This is no large supermarket - there are few toiletries, no car tires, no toys. Just groceries. Fresh cured hams hanging from the ceiling. A butcher. A small produce area and smaller freezer section. Employees who have worked there for ages and who are friendly and happy to serve. Bag boys who bag your groceries for you with a minimum of surliness or smashing of the bread.

The main reason I love Jr's is that it reminds me very vividly of the grocery store my parents had when I was a child. From the time I was 3 until I was 7 my parents owned a small grocery store in Woodbine, a working class neighborhood of South Nashville.

It was housed in an old stone building, seemingly ancient to my young eyes. My mom was the cashier, and my father was the butcher and also delivered groceries to older residents of the neighborhood. They hired a teenage boy to bag groceries and help stock the shelves. Mr. Smith, the man they bought the store from, came in a few times a week to help with the butchering.

While the grocery store meant long hours, hard work, no vacations and many headaches for my parents, it was for me a golden time and a magical place. I spent hours playing games and chasing caterpillars on the long front porch. I remember the many lunches I had with kind Mr. Smith, who always took my seriously and had the patience of ten men. I remember he would fix us each a bologna sandwich, grab a cold drink (in glass bottles) from the refrigerated case, and set up two cola crates for us to sit on. We would sit there, munching our sandwiches and talking for ages. I remember we called those our "board meetings" and he would talk about anything I wanted to discuss. I loved him as much as anyone else in my life. He was also a warm, constant presence.

The thing I remember most about the story was the sense of community I felt, even as a young child. The beauty shop where my mother and I got our hair cut was just down the street, and we would walk there together. When it came time for me to start school, my parents got permission for me to attend Woodbine Elementary, which was 2 blocks from the store. I remember walking to school every morning with my mother, waving and saying hi to people as we passed their houses. In the afternoons I would walk to the home either Jo Shannon or Jason, my best friends who lived across the street from each other. My mother would come collect me about 5:00. The times after school were spent playing in Jason's treehouse, running through the neighborhood, playing cowboys and Indians, and shooting Jason with his bb gun. It was a time of innocence, and I don't believe I will ever be able to create such a world for my children.

This halcyon world of mine ended at the end of first grade. Interstate 440 was being built and it literally went right through the backyard of our store. At a single stroke, the neighborhood was wrenched apart - streets disappeared as well as the community that had flourished there.

I haven't been back to that neighborhood in well over a decade. All the people I once knew have either died or left the area. The last time I went it was so different that it was as if the place had never existed, except perhaps only in my imagination.