Parcel Pickup & Corndogs

Diary of a 70’s Kid

Photo by Megan Bucknall on Unsplash

Every time a celebrity from back in the day dies, I feel like another piece of my childhood is being snatched from me. This time it was Bonnie Tyler, and as I regaled my husband with tales of my youth, for the millionth time, my mind shifted gears, and I blurted out:

What ever happened to parcel pick up?

Odd, right? One minute I’m talking about the bright-eyed soundtrack to my non-existent 7th-grade love life (see what I did there?) and the next, I’m asking where the heck those huge plastic bins and corresponding tags at the grocery store went.

They disappeared without anyone, including me, noticing. I closed my eyes and revelled in the memory.

For those of you who don’t remember, grocery stores used to have a big track with rollers at the front of the store. The track went from inside to the outside.

When you bought groceries, if your order was more than you could carry, the clerk placed your bags in large, numbered plastic bins. They were always red. Each bin had a corresponding tag, made of the same plastic, bearing the same number.

The clerk then gave you the tag or tags, and you got into your car, drove to the outer front of the store, near the roller, gave a staff member the tags and out came the bins. The employee loaded the groceries into your trunk, and you were on your way.

I remember every Saturday, going shopping with my dad. We’d go to “town,” and our first stop was Dominion (they had the best bakery brownies). We’d get our stuff and go.

Those bins, tags and that roller fascinated me to no end.

In my 4-year-old mind, I wanted first to sit in a bin and get pushed through the roller grocery conveyor at warp speed, and then to get a job as the person who got to load groceries all day. It looked mighty important to me. And I was super impressed that we always got the right groceries (I didn’t quite understand the number thing).

Neither of those things happened.

What did happen, almost every time was after our grocery excursion, we’d go to Woolco, and I’d get a corndog at the snack bar. We didn’t call it that then; I think we called it a Dippy Dog. Dad just called it “weiner on a stick.” Whatever it was called, the only place you could get it was Woolco, and it was heaven! And no, the frozen Pogo Sticks are NOT the same.

The smell - that intoxicating aroma of deep-fried, professionally dipped hot dog into a cornmeal batter, wrapped in a perfectly sized parchment paper; I can almost feel it in my nose. The mustard, not the regular yellow crap we had at home…no, we’re talking fancy stuff, right there on the counter with the ketchup, relish and raw diced onions.

Now, we lug our groceries out to the car ourselves, and there’s no dippy dog at the end of the shopping trip. Customer service like that doesn’t exist, and goodness knows if my mid-life body would tolerate deep-fried weiner on a stick. I’m not going to test it.

What I am going to do is thank Jerv Nai Matrap for the awesome prompt that allows me to share this memory.:

July 14: Close your eyes for a few minutes and think back to childhood. Not the memories you always remember. Wait for one that arrives unexpectedly. A forgotten moment, a small detail, something you haven’t thought about in years. What surfaces?

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My novel, I Ran So You Could Fly (The Paris O’Ree Story), is available on Amazon here in Paperback, Kindle, or, if you don’t like Amazon, it’s also on Kobo

Be sure to pick up your copy of Chicken Soup For the Soul: What I Learned From My Dog, available at fine bookstores everywhere, and turn to page 235 to see my story.

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