I could never count the hours I spent as a child running around the shopping center that housed my parent’s store, hiding and seeking with my sister as well as my own self. That shopping center was a playground that granted us clearly set boundaries alongside nearly limitless freedom.

I could never enumerate the myriad ways in which I was shaped in these millions of minutes. Though some day I may sit down and sketch some of it out, I could only hope to cover some of what I remember, and of course I can’t remember it all.

I do remember much of it, however, and here is a tiny nutshell in chronological order.

1) The bookstore that was right around the corner from my parent’s flower shop was home to nearly everything exciting I ever read prior to adolescence. School gave me plenty of functional text, but I found little of it engaging. It was the Walden Books that gave me Stephen King, Dragonlance, Anne Rice, Truly Tasteless Jokes, and a fresh stacks of comics each and every week. I would lose hours, holed up in the back of the bookstore turning pages and stopping only to check back in with my parents at the appointed time.

2) The movie theater that sat just a couple hundred yards away from the doors of the flower shop housed more cinematic memories than most childhoods could ever hope to hold. If my sister and I had saved our ticket stubs I could probably wallpaper my office. I believe it was in that theater, where I first saw E.T. and just about every Spielberg movie to follow for the next two decades, that my affection for a good flick blossomed into true love.

3) The ins and outs of that parking lot were where I learned the rules of the road. I was given both a car and driver’s license at sixteen with the understanding that I would drive directly to work at the end of each school day to take the store’s afternoon deliveries. I logged in hundreds of hours behind the wheel before I turned seventeen and knew my city so well, I rarely needed to map my deliveries.

4) The flower shop is where I grew up and learned to be me. When some unsavory souls tried to slip away in the middle of the night with a business my parents had spent my lifetime to build, shortly after I turned 18, my immediate instinct was to step into shoes that were way too big for my teenage feet. I learned to fill them quickly, and thus diverted the drift of my life for the next dozen years.

5) Working with my father and sister was a treasure. Though not every second was rainbows and roses, I loved working by their side for as long as I did, and wouldn’t exchange the experience for anything. My father is the hardest working person I’ve ever known and my sister arranges flowers in the most impossibly beautiful ways.

5) The tireless work. With few exceptions, I worked six days a week, 52 weeks a year for over a decade. My honeymoon felt long because I took a four day weekend. Though the exhausting schedule demanded by the flower business was not something I wished to carry with me well into my arthritic years, I am grateful for the life lessons learned. It was that unyielding schedule that allowed me to know I had the strength to do what has been necessary this last half year as I appeared as a ghostwriter from nowhere, attempting to move my family from A to B.

The one thing forever gone I will miss most of all is the sacred ground of the store itself.

My mother and father split when I was 17, yet even though my mother was no longer a cog within the store’s machinery, she could still be found within its walls. All four of us could, on rare occasions, still be seen together under that singular roof. Alas, this is no longer.

As time passed, finding the four of us together grew rarer and rarer, but the store was always the beacon that continued to bring us together. Now our unions will be even rarer, but perhaps that scarcity will only serve to strengthen the character of our memory.

Writer Dad