KINGSVIEW

THE TRIP TO WALMART

Michael A. King

To this day, notwithstanding the heresies I am about to write, I flinch from the Walmartization of America and increasingly the world (now that Walmart is the largest company in it). Let no one construe the story I am about to tell as indicating otherwise. But somehow I just keep getting older and life just keeps getting more complicated, and so I am going to tell a tale in which ideals clash with realities in ways I have yet to disentangle.

So I won’t try, except to say just quickly here, then let the story speak for itself, that the trip to Walmart did make me think this: Maybe we must live life as it is, in all its messy grandeur, and not only life as we think it should be, and accept that one of life’s great challenges is how to negotiate between what is and what could be.

The Walmart saga begins in the early 1990s. I had resigned several years earlier as pastor of Germantown Mennonite Church in Philadelphia but our family continued to live nearby. We then commuted from our urban setting to church involvements at Salford Mennonite Church in the Harleysville area of southeastern Pennsylvania. As urban dwellers we loved the city but were also quite taken with the contrasting beauty of Harleysville’s bucolic, rolling pastures and woodlots. Eventually we settled into them, in a home a few minutes from the Salford congregation.

We then watched in horror as thousands more people had the same idea, turning our area into yet one more of those fast-growing communities seemingly hell-bent on replacing pristine land with developments whose countrified names like Fox Trot, Creekside, Rolling Farms were about all that remained of the reality they replaced.

Then came the humdinger. Right there on what had been the farm of the Kulps, members of our very own congregation, Walmart planned to build one of its temples to American consumerism. Our family fumed and fulminated about the travesty and would have sworn, if Mennonites swore. But we don’t swear, since Jesus told us to let our yea be yea and our nay be nay, so we just very very passionately affirmed that we would never ever darken the doors of that den of iniquity except maybe to take in some whips and drive out the moneychangers at the cash registers.

Then groundbreaking came and day by day, with grief and anger, we watched the Walmart walls go up. We dreaded the day when its doors would open and the hungry hordes would stampede in, trampling over all the local businesses about to be destroyed, as so many have been, when Walmart sucked all their customers into its slobbering maw.

Finally came the day of infamy for the Harleysville area. I forget whether our collapse came that day or a few days later, but it came so quickly as to give no evidence at all that we did in fact have functional Walmart antibodies.

I remember yet, with a shiver, the look on our family members’ faces as we saw for the first time, right there in our backyard on this former Mennonite farm, the Walmart smiley faces and heard the defining words of our era, “Welcome to Walmart.” The sad truth is this: What was on our faces was something almost like awe combined with whatever crumpling effect a face gives off when values thought to be for life prove to be about as strong as toilet paper. We liked Walmart and we were horrified to realize this. That was what our faces were trying to register.

I could go on, detail upon detail, to tell of how for weeks or maybe even months we managed at least to say we disagreed with our behavior as we indulged in it, but why belabor the sordid truth? The fact is, in no time at all we were shopping at Walmart constantly, and we’ve never quit.

Then came last week the trip to Walmart that stirred this column into being. I had had a rotten few weeks because I had changed computers several times and spent day after day configuring computers while work piled up. Oh, computers, e-mail, Internet, speeding everything up, taking away from us the gentle pacing of life like it was lived on the Kulp farm before Walmart came. . . .

But that’s another story, except to say that amid computer woes (I’m writing on my new computer, which now every time I boot up flashes a warning that the hard disk is going to crash any minute, but I don’t have enough minutes to worry about it until it happens), I had done an even worse job than usual of figuring out how to get everything done and still find enough peace in my soul at the end of the day to cherish my family. I felt a constant undercurrent of sadness at how quickly all my daughters were growing up, next one headed to college in months, and how often I wasn’t sharing the journey with them.

But one evening the spell of busyness, for reasons I’m not entirely clear about, lifted. For a few shining hours I didn’t care about all that was not getting done. Meanwhile Katie was getting this and that ready for her big high school senior prom and Kristy, home from college, was enjoying the sisterhood of helping her get ready. In the midst of their brainstorming, they decided mostly on a lark to head off to Walmart to get some little something. Sensing I was feeling wild, they asked, “Dad, do you want to go with us?” I decided to just go crazy, live it up, and head off with them.

So, practically giggling with the giddiness of it all, I fear, we raced out to Katie’s car, since this was really her trip and she wanted to be the driver both literally and symbolically. My dear daughters put me in the back seat, where I’ve rarely been when with them.

They put some kind of really loud teenage-type music on, that stuff with none of the haunting beauty to it that music had before computers and Walmart, and after all the times I’ve told her about how she’s going to kill herself doing it, Katie went down our country road (there is still a little country behind Walmart and between the developments) at I don’t know how many miles over the speed limit. But I was in the back seat and she was in charge, so after protesting and getting back her claim that it really was no faster than I’d be driving, which was too true, I shut up.

And I noticed a lot of things I hope I never forget. I noticed what it felt like to be in a car (remember the world when there were just horses on farms that are now Walmart?) in the backseat while the wind on that late spring day blew back my daughters’ hair to reveal the grinning faces of these two whose diapers I had changed (a reminder they never appreciate) as we flew on our wild trip.

Right in the middle of it all the world outside or at least inside me twisted on its axis and I caught my breath, because it was just as clear as it had ever been to me that we were in a holy moment. If I could just stay within it, I was being given a gift of gifts, the blessing of for those few moments truly seeing my daughters and the entire world as they and I were intended to be but so rarely are.

Perhaps partly because it truly is majestic and mystical and also partly just because it’s different to my eyes and so not yet spoiled by taken-for-grantedness, the landscapes of the American West take my breath away. Often in humdrum moments my mind wanders to the sere highlands of Nevada; the wild-flower carpets once glimpsed in the Anza-Borrego wildlands of southern California; the lonesome delights of old Route 66 on the way to Kingman, Arizona, from which sometimes can be spied far off in the distance, across Native American tribal land, hints of this strange high ledge, and if you were to drive toward it some 20 or 30 miles more you would realize it was the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

There on that trip to Walmart, with the landscape of ordinary old Morwood Road flashing by in the cool air under the fading twilight sun, with Katie laughing at the wheel and Kristy chattering beside her, the world lurched and the feeling of being in the West leaped right into my heart here in the humdrum East. I could see that day-to-day world as if for the very first pristine time, and it was lovely beyond even the words I’m trying to draw on to describe it.

Then we arrived at Walmart, there on top of the old Kulp farm, and we all wondered aloud again at this delight we were deriving from a little trip to bad Walmart, and we didn’t know what to do, because we hate Walmart but we love it. So we just lived on in a strange world where things often don’t hang together, where an awful lot goes wrong, where if we pave over too many more farms what will be left, and we thrilled to the joy of just being alive with each other in the mess.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount (Pa.) Mennonite Church; and editor, DreamSeeker Magazine.