Mall Playland Part 6 - A Strange Beauty

At the mall, Baby J and I walk a lot. We go back and forth, in and out of stores, alongside the ladies power-walking their way to better health and between with the mall cops rolling to and fro on their segways, past the kiosks of skeevy salesmen with their dubious looking skin-care products and places where you can get your image on a t-shirt or coffee mug.

Perhaps because I spend so much time in the mall I see it for something bigger and more profound than it really is. But, to me, there's something strange and beautiful, almost poetic, about a baby walking through a massive mall oblivious to all the weird things that go on there.

There a palpable, omnipresent tension at the mall, a "mall-aise." Shoppers with bags full walk with only moments left to enjoy the fleeting, narcotic high they get off the fumes of their purchases before it evaporates. Failing businesses on the brink of dissolution offer impossible sales in spasms of desperation. Bored looking shopgirls lean on their make-up counters wearing clothes intended to make them look mature and professional but which just seem to accentuate how young they are. Packs of gawky teenagers stand about wearing kooky outfits, cussing at each other, looking surly and malcontent.

But everybody smiles at Baby J who, in return, smiles back or waves "bye-byes." Sometimes, I can even get her to blow kisses. For a moment, it's like Baby J has everyone forget themselves, forgets the tension. Or maybe it's that she helps everyone to remember themselves. After all, the shoppers, storeowners, shopgirls, and teenagers were all babies once too. Maybe what I find beautiful about a baby in the mall is that it connects everyone back to their own innocent youth for a fraction of a second.

Or, like I said, maybe because I spend so much time in the mall I see it for something bigger and more profound than it really is