THE DEATH OF PINK

‘The Shop Around The Corner’ had been there as far back as I could remember. Funny, now that I think about it, it is not so much around the corner as it is ON the corner. But ‘around’ gives a magical feel to it, like candy floss that melts in your mouth, when you roll it around the tongue, washing your insides with the sugary sweetness of childhood and innocence.

I remember buying my first book from there. A library full of books later, I’m back to Mrs. Edie Bloom and her tiny shop. Time has stood still. People walk by. New people, who cant know or feel the end of an era for the playground-full of children whose lives have been shaped by the slight little lady who is no more. My generation is indebted to Mrs Edie and others like her who looked hard enough to recognize the preciousness in children.

Story-time in The Shop Around The Corner lured every kid crazy for ice cream and soft-ball, to the small dark nook under the stairs where she sat, waiting for us to curb the restless excitement of play that dusted us dirty and grubby. Lemonade in tall glasses, with drops of water running down the sides. Condensation, a word I learnt one such afternoon, thirty something years ago. I have been condensed too, from a world much too weary to carry me weightless on its shoulder.

‘ So, we’re finally here, huh.’ My daughter looks out of the car window at the shop with intense concentration in a kind attempt to recapture my enchanted childhood. ‘Yes, we’re finally here.’ The finality of the moment envelops me in poignant calmness. As we proceeded up the steps, I hear a familiar voice, now adult, and I turned round to see my old neighbour, Alison Knobb. ‘ Just like old times’, Alison remarks and immediately realizes the inappropriateness of her words. A silence hung over our heads and I sensed I must rescue Alison from her well-intentioned slight so I took her hand in mine. Elizabeth’s eyes expressed confusion mixed with complete comprehension of what the holding of hands revealed. Children can be a lifetime wiser than adults and Lizzie’s wisdom made me love her more, if that was possible.

The shop, as we enter, is people-filled. Faces known and long forgotten suddenly become friends again in an instant. Old, young, middle-aged. Friends, family, strangers. Mrs. Edie had called us all together under one roof to become a community of like-minded companions, sharing one thought, indebted to one person.

I hadn’t worn black, as was customary, nor had I dressed Lizzie in black. As I look about the room, I see people in a rainbow of colours. It seems more like a wedding or a celebration of a happy occasion than a funeral wake. People were mourning, and at the same time, they were not. Conversation passed itself around the room like cake, and everyone seemed to savour its bittersweet taste.

My own sense of tranquility, I believe, came from the fact that I’d grown to look on death not as an end but rather as a beginning. I am not religious. The whole Heaven and Hell thing seemed to me a concept, an idea too distant to relate to. All I know is that human beings are bigger than Death. We are much more companionable and friendly. My father died when I was sixteen, and I remember feeling shattered and raped by death. I also remember Mrs Edie standing on our doorstep with a plate of pink Jell-O. Somewhere in my teenage mind, I recall thinking how grotesque anything pink would look against a black back-drop. I did not like the colour pink then and my feelings towards it have not changed. Thinking back though, looking back, I found it strange that Mrs Edie had chosen to bring me pink Jell-O, considering I was already too old to even mildly appreciate candy, unless it came from a boy. Yet in that moment, her inappropriate gift consumed my sadness and my father became a pink memory, nestled about in a halo of stars.

Im suddenly assaulted by a ridiculous thought, sweet in its absurdity. ‘Everyone must be thinking pink.’ I could not explain the comfortable tranquility of the mourners otherwise. As my daughter trails patiently behind me, I recognize faces, and I associate each one with a memory. Amanda Waters who had wanted to be Rapunzel. Brian Cooper, the prince who kissed Snow White( Alexis Minton). Tom ‘Jumbo the Elephant’ Silver. I see Amanda’s got Rapunzel’s golden tresses and Brian’s Snow White is beside him. We are all intertwined by afternoons at Mrs. Edie’s, with lemonade and fantasy.

Someone behind my back inquires about the fate of the bookshop, now that the ‘lil old lady’ was gone. ‘Her niece is putting it up for sale’, is another voice’s reply. My ‘Think Pink’ calm slowly dissipates like cigarette smoke, creating chaos in the air.

My callousness chokes me suddenly. Why had I never known that she was all alone? Most every single day of my childhood wrapped up in her world of pink and every other happy colour and I’d never thought to venture beyond the bookshop. Mrs. Edie had begun and ended with the bookshop. She was all of it and it was her. Now it was going to some corporate giant without a face, without a body, and my childhood haven would be torn down. Helplessness seized me and all the colour was wiped out of my head.

We live our entire lives trying to outrun inevitabilities that will never defer to us.



A month or so later, I’m back on the same street, watching the demolition men set up their equipment to tear down ‘The Shop Around The Corner’. I hold my daughter’s hand as we watch in silence the last of the beams fall. I realized at that moment that this was the way it was supposed to be. She must have known it too, Mrs Edie, the inevitability of things and places and people. Continuity is merely a word we like to play with to tell ourselves all is not lost. And indeed, all was not lost because memory remains, safe from the lepered hands of time.

As we drive away from the place that once housed my dreams, I finally understood a poem Mrs.Edie used to read to us:

“But she and Death, acquainted,
Meet tranquilly as friends,
Salute and pass without a hint-
And there the matter ends.