I miss Sears.  

Every year, as the summer days started getting shorter, Mom would herd my two brothers and I into an old blue Ford four door and make the annual trek to our local Sears store with the singular purpose of shopping for new school clothes for the coming school year starting in September.  

Although she made us think we were picking out the clothes we wanted, she was really guiding us through a clever reverse psychology to pick out the jeans, shirts, and sometimes shoes, that she wanted us to have.  I looked forward to the new clothes but I whined through the whole process.  Mom would stand guard in front of the fitting room curtain and shove an armful of clothes through the slit with the command “try these on and let me see what they look like.”  I would quickly slip out of my cutoff jean shorts and raggedy T-shirt and tug on the very stiff, very dark blue Levis Blue Jeans.  I always wore Levis Jeans and continue to this day.  I could never adapt to the fit of a pair of Wrangler jeans.  I  completed the ensemble with the shirt provided, an alternating green and blue striped shirt. 

I sauntered out from behind the curtain in a stiff legged Frankenstein walk exaggerating the extended Frankenstein arms for the benefit of my giggling brothers who were too young to need school clothes at this particular visit.  New Jeans smelled good but were like putting on a pair of plaster-of-paris leg casts.  “Walk normal please!” My mother demanded.  I dutifully performed the fitting room walk while Mom checked the length and then the waist by placing her thumb inside the jeans and pulling the jeans away from my torso to see how much play I had between my skinny body and the jeans.  The interrogation would then start.  Walking up and down in stiff legged jeans and getting peppered with questions from Mom was no longer fun at this point. 

“How do they feel?”  
“They feel like jeans.”
“How do they fit?” 
“It’s hard to walk in them, but I guess they fit fine Mom, can I take them off now?” 
“No, go put on the other shirt I gave you and let me see how it looks with those jeans.”  

This would continue for another hour or so.  

As an adult reliving this memory, I now realize that I was a human paper doll providing my mother with the opportunity to get her fashion designer yearnings out of her system. After what seemed like a week in Sears, we had a significant stack of clothing that would soon be my fashion statement for the coming school year. I would proudly wear those new clothes on the first day of school and every day after until school let out at the end of the following May.

By the end of the school year nine months later, I would have grown a couple of inches and my jeans were now what would be considered “high waters”. I’d get some teasing from some of the meaner kids those lasts weeks of school. Once it was officially summer, Mom would get out the scissors and those jeans would become cutoff shorts to be worn through the summer months until once again the summer days would get shorter and it would be time for another visit to Sears. This process would repeat until I started high school.

I miss Sears.

My first credit card was a Sears card.  I got it in 1984.  I think it had a credit limit of $300.  I think they mistook me for my dad.  We both have the same name, I’m just a Junior.  I used that credit card to buy a Panasonic “Walkman” that played a cassette tape.  So, my first ever credit purchase was a Walkman copy. 

I was so excited to have a credit card.  My next card, a couple of years later, was a gas card – Gulf I think it was.   It was not a common thing to have a credit card.  Most people didn’t trust or want one. 

My parents didn’t own a credit card until much later in life.  Except for car and house, they paid cash for everything.  If they didn’t have the cash they put it on layaway.   Everyone used layaway.  The annual school clothing trip always resulted in my school wardrobe being put on layaway.  My Mother would drive down to Sears on paydays and pay a little bit with the intention of having the merchandise out of layaway before the first day of school.

I miss Sears.

I miss the Sears Christmas Wish Book, hell, I miss Toys R Us, but as a kid you would look forward to that annual special Sears catalog coming in the mail sometime in October or early November.  A kid could spend a whole day leafing through the Wish Book circling desired toys and ear marking pages so you could come back later and write your letter to Santa.  When Santa stopped being real we still circled and ear marked pages for Mom.  She would purchase a subset of our requests (because we wanted the moon and more) in early November and put everything on layaway until right before Christmas Eve.

I miss Sears. The store was such a big part of my childhood and even into adulthood. The wife and I bought our first washer and dryer from Sears. I still have my Craftsman tool sets.