Things I miss

 I was thinking about this the other day. Some of the things I miss are places I used to go, some of the things I miss are experiences that won't come again in my life. Some of the things are feelings.

I guess the places are simplest. Like, I still miss JoAnn Fabrics. Yes, I know they were a huge corporation and they did shady stuff like all of them do, and I rolled my eyes about the "jacked up prices so we can put it on sale" things. But it was also just NICE going there, I could walk the aisles and think of the possibilities (I can't remember if they were the "Imagine the Possibilities!" craft store or if it was another one) of things I could make. And for a few brief months when there was a real surge of knitting books coming out, and I got coupons in the mail (and later, e-mail) for 40% off, my library really grew.

They did fall on hard times and I know a few times even before their bankruptcy was announced I wondered at the lack of restocking and how, like, they didn't get new yarn lines in.

And now they're gone. We do still have Michael's but they're not the same - more heavily "party oriented" (I am NOT a "party" person, I know that) and the one we have is small so the yarn and the fabric sections they have are small. (There is Hobby Lobby, but I choose not to shop there, for Reasons). And I do have the little yarn shop which is no farther than Michael's, but their stock is smaller and more expensive. 

I miss having the used bookstore in town; heck, I miss there really being places I could "pop in" and say hi to the owner and browse a little and maybe buy something or maybe not, if I didn't find anything I wanted. We suffer here for a lack of third places, or maybe I do (because I'm not a casino goer, nor do I have kids in "activities" like sports or cheer/tumbling) and I think that's one thing I would really like to see here, and that might help keep me here once I retire - rather than me plotting and planning and budgeting and seeing if I can buy a place somewhere else, where there are more people with similar interests to me. I mean,maybe the little romance-themed bookstore will succeed and expand and we'll have a proper bookstore again, but given it was labeled "pop up" and given economics here I'm bracing myself for it to go away some time. 

I miss there being a nice 'light lunch' place. Waaaaaay back when I lived in Ann Arbor there were numerous places close to campus where you could grab a simple sandwich or something fairly quickly, but they had servers and some of them (I remember one called, I think it was The Continental) were nice, and quiet and calm and were sometimes what I just needed. Here we have mainly fast food which serves a purpose but i rarely eat it because of health and taste reasons. We have a few nicer places but they're all "bigger" meals that are heavier and not suited for lunch. (We once had a "ladies' restaurant," you might call it, with simple sandwiches and salads, but the owner of the shop it was in retired and they closed).

Of course, I miss all the people I've lost. I still miss Steve some times, and I miss Del. And I miss Mecy and lots of other folks who have passed on. And I miss colleagues who were here when I came here who have since retired - oh, one or two come back once in a while, but it's not the same and it's a little lonely being the person with the longest tenure here and most people are so far younger than I am. And I miss people who have moved on in their life and we didn't keep up the acquaintanceship or whatever it was (and makes me think that "maybe what I thought of as friendship sometimes wasn't"). I also think people in general have changed since the pandemic; I can't quite put my finger on it but it's like some people have locked down and basically said "I'm good with just my nuclear family, I don't need any new people" and that leaves people like me a little out in the cold, and you know? Finding what you might call "found family" is way harder than it seems in books or movies. 

I miss the days of active knitblogging, back in the early 2000s. Heck, I miss the older, weirder, less-corporate Web. I miss when people would hang out their little shingle and write about their life and you could read it and sometimes comment, and sometimes people commented on your blog. But over time, some of those folks who had been in college or whatever got full time jobs. Or got married. Or had a kid. Or just got bored and decided they had written everything they could. (Some days i wonder if I've exhausted my capacity to say anything interesting and if maybe it's time to close this blog down). Some of them found out they could advertise their books or their shop and the blog pivoted to advertising, and then closed down after people like me quit visiting because there's only so much advertising a person can take.

But for a few years in the early 2000s, it was really fun! And really nice. But I think just like after JoAnn's died that we will never get a large chain that sells dressmaker fabric and notions again, we'll never get a time of people just hobbyblogging for fun again. Everyone's too tired and too busy, too many people are working multiple jobs or some folks have bought into the "never do anything you can't make into a side hustle' (so you get things like paid substacks instead)

 

 Maybe what I really miss is more of a community feeling? For example, I JUST remember as a kid when the town I grew up in did Ice Cream Socials one night every summer: people baked cakes or pies(!) and brought them down, and the Junior League or somebody dished them up on paper plates, and you picked what you wanted and also got either a scoop or a little paper-wrapped brick of vanilla ice cream, and people sat around on the village green and talked and ate dessert and I think now how no one ever poisoned anyone and I guess people with certain allergies just decided to be careful (like: not taking anything with chocolate) and now it just wouldn't happen because people would worry about hygiene standards or someone putting something untoward in their pie and whatever. Never mind that there's no longer the kind of large volunteer group to do the serving. And so again, everyone clamps down in their little family groups (or maybe friend groups) and you  lose that kind of interaction. 

I want to hope the future will bring "new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty" but i admit I'm old enough and disappointed enough by life at this point to doubt it. I don't even know what a new community thing would LOOK like, given how fractious some people are....