Sears Years
The Sears catalogue would arrive in the mail three times a year. Spring and Summer, Fall and Winter, and the sacred Christmas catalogue. Where all the newest coolest toys were made infinitely desirable in luscious colourful spreads splashed across the page. And man, those catalogue kids sure looked like they were having fun with all those toys. But nothing would be ordered from it. Christmas shopping would be local or taken care of in a trip to the Parkland Mall in Red Deer.
But in a small prairie town with limited retail options the Fall and Winter catalogue was pivotal for the ordering of clothing for school and winter. Not excessive ordering. As needed. Nothing frivolous. Cost and practicality trumping fashion. Fashion beaten down until fashion whimpered.
But Mum, I really like those other pants, referring to the groovy ones that didn’t look like two potato sacks sewn together by a penniless hermit. Whining, cajoling, and moodiness would get me nowhere. Any hope lay in remaining calm and courteous. Routinely an exercise in futility but every now and then a miracle would occur. My mother’s deep conditioning, ingrained growing up working class poor in wartime industrial England, would crack. Every two or three years. And some item she saw as extravagant, frivolous, or costly would be purchased.
Not in this case. Not with these pants. Baggy ill-fitting corduroy pants with a flannel lining that would keep me warm in the sometimes punishing cold of the prairie winter were my fate. Available in rotted vegetable green and good ole shit brown. My Mum didn’t see baggy or ill-fitting, she only saw the innate functional practicality of flannel lined cords with an outer shell fabricated from a blend of cotton and indestructible polyester fibres pioneered in WWII. She beamed. It gave her tangible pleasure.
Of course she was right. I stayed warm delivering newspapers on my after school route on the most punishing prairie winter late afternoons. Never once returning home with legs frozen into brittle sticks requiring amputation at the hip. These pants never wore out. Your only hope was to grow out of them or to deliberately destroy them.
By the way, I was a vain little prick. I would leaf through the boys’ fashions, checking out the perfectly coiffed smiling lads wearing all the latest styles, thinking to myself, yah, I could be a catalogue model. I’m good-looking, slim and trim, I could do that. That could be me. I could stand around in fancy clothes with a benign unforced smile, looking off into the distance at something mysteriously beyond the two dimensions of the page. Hold my arms and hands in stiff unnatural gestures, point upward and outward at things only catalogue people could see. I’d look so dope in avocado coloured cords, or striped flares, or a knitted diamond-patterned pullover vest. Yah, that could be me.
Then there were the bras. Pages and pages of rows and rows of women, waist up, wearing only bras! What sorcery was this? I’d stare at them, a queasy fire in my belly, I’d flip the page and there were more women in bras! Panties too! Not just women, teens! Looking out of the catalogue page smiling away. Sometimes seemingly looking right at me. Nothing made them happier than lounging around half naked on a catalogue page staring blankly out into my world. Satiny smooth bras, bras with ornate patterns woven into their elasticized superstructure, pointy bras, rounded bras, beige, white, or sometimes adventurously coloured. In a trance-like state I would study the banquet of conical and domed tits, imagining what fleshy wonders lay concealed behind those bras.
In the real world girls were growing tits. Sherry Stack – yes, Stack – had them. In Grade 5! A rare and exotic creature. As strong as an ox and revered by all the boys. In Grade 6 there were more. They were sprouting everywhere. Bras could be seen though white cotton blouses – unbelievable - or the outlines of them through t-shirts. Beverley Sutherland had them, they sat there like two perfect cupcakes in the display case at Bloke’s Bakery. I thought I would lose my mind. The new girl Kim Kennedy had them. Ample. Instant fame. No trouble fitting in. I can recall with stunning lucidity the contour of them in the snug t-shirts she wore, the mechanics of the bra clasp clearly visible when sitting behind her in social studies. She glided through the halls and boys and girls alike parted before her like the Red Sea. There were those with and those without. Those with were royalty, those without, maids in waiting.
In Junior High Sears catalogues gave way to Playboy magazines, Garret Brockford’s Dad had an extensive collection. Who needs bras - hello soft porn. A few grittier Penthouse mags featured racier photos and the invaluable resource of Penthouse Forum, letters from readers describing in explicit detail their sexual experiences. Key descriptors such as “thick load of pecker snot” could be learned here and integrated into daily conversation. Magazines laid out across the carpet, opened to photo spreads and centrefolds in a carpeted wood paneled basement which may or may not have been windowless, we pored over them with scholarly zeal. Sweating and stinking.
So long Sears. With dry mouths and unacknowledged wood, childhood stumbled into the gutter.
Oy yoi yoi yoi yoi. You funny.
"But Mum, I really like those other pants, referring to the groovy ones that didn’t look like two potato sacks sewn together by a penniless hermit." Genius writing David! This is crazy, because Steve and I have had repeated conversations about our reverence for the Sear's catalogue, growing up. I would pore over it greedily during the holiday season, coveting the Johnny West figurines. My mother did her shopping in Sherwood Park, at the Zellers. A lot of my clothes came from K Mart, Saan or Salvation Army. I am embarrassed to say that, at age 7, I wore gaucho parts without requisite shame. I LIKED THEM, in fact and paired these abominations with knee socks with the initials B.C.R. on them (for, natch, BAY CITY ROLLERS!). Thankfully there is no photographic evidence of this. I faced terrible bullying in the 7th grade when I naively told classmates my jacket came from Salvation Army. It was considered verboten because my generation, even pre-instagram, was not impervious to shallow commercial conceits. Levis were cool, Wranglers were not, etc. My mother did not shop at Salvation Army because of we were poor (though we weren't affluent either). Like your mom, she was practical. Later, when I grew up, I loved Salvation Army, bought cheap knock off Converse sneakers there. I am going to pass this post along to Steve, who will LOVE THIS. He has also waxed nostalgic about Penthouse forum. We bought a vintage Penthouse once when traveling through the U.S. When I was a child, my dad read Playboy and Penthouse, and these publications were unashamedly placed on the coffee table. My parents also had a copy of Joy of Sex, the version with the hippy couple, and my childhood friends and I would paw through it when our parents were away. We pretended to be dismayed, rather than mildly titillated and curious. This is so fucking good David. I hope you are going to publish a memoir. I read Margaret Atwood's memoir recently and, while I love her novels, it was perfunctory. This is much more lyrical and interesting, and, I suppose I have a selfish interest, in that you are articulating a timeline and geography that I inhabited. Keep up the great work. Keep on writing! ps. I too, wore my share of shit brown cords, flared (the pant legs would get caught in my bike spokes) and Cougar platform shoes.