The Eastfield Mall is a shell

I have been getting my haircut by the folks at the Mall Barbershop in the Eastfield Mall for more than 40 years. I could get it cut anywhere but they are who I go to and I don't feel like changing now. We have a system: I walk in and say, "Hey". They say "Hey" back and then I say, "Put your number 1 on and cut it off." When they are done, they say, "That'll be $15.00" and we conclude our transaction.

I got to chatting with the owner today and she said that the mall is just about empty and she doesn't expect her shop will be there very much longer.

When I was done with my haircut, I took a quick walk in the mall and, man, that place is a ghost town.

If you want to buy a desk calendar, a glitter-coated cover for your cell phone, some cheap crap for a dollar or if you want your nails done by a very excited, very skinny asian woman, they got you covered but pretty much everything else is boarded up.

It won't be a sad day when they knock that place down but a piece of my history will be gone.

You see, back in the 1960s when I was 9 or 10 years old, they were building the mall. It was a long corridor connecting the Forbes & Wallace store to the Sears & Roebuck Store. My buddy John and I went there on our bikes, found a way in and discovered, much to our joy, they had recently poured cement.

So somewhere in the area of what used to be the small fountain, across from what used to be Steigers and then Macys, where the entrance to The Flaming Pit used to be, John and I put our initials in the cement. To my knowledge, those initials are still there.

And for the record, we also put our initials in the cement of the floor at the Wilbraham Junior High when it was built in in the late 60s. So even after they tear the mall down, we still got the middle school going for us. Of course, it's only a matter of time before they tear that moldy, leaky pile of crap down as well.

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My hair is cut, dinner is done and the animals are sprawled on their respective couches/rugs/beds resting from a long day of napping.

Here are today's links:

• You have to read the video description to really appreciate this video.



• Dictatorships all seem to have that "Do what I say, not what I do!" attitude.



• Yet one more reason to not fly commerical.



• Only in Florida.



• I'm looking forward to this.