Mall Rat

A mall is defined as a large area, usually lined with shade trees and shrubbery, used as a public walk or promenade. (www.dictionary.com)

There is a mall in Central Park in New York City – a beautiful walkway through old Elm trees leading towards the lake. There’s a mall in Washington, DC – a long strip of greenery lined with trees and surrounded by museums and monuments. There are malls in lots of cities, places where people walked and ran and met friends and enjoyed the outdoors.

So now we get to a ‘shopping’ mall, which is defined as a large retail complex containing a variety of stores and restaurants housed in a series of connected or adjacent buildings or a single large building. (www.dictionary.com) (Sadly, dictionary.com lists the definition of “shopping mall” as the first definition of “mall.” What does this say about our current society?)

As my guest blogster pointed out in my November 4 entry, it says that we use shopping malls in the same way that our ancestors used malls. Sure, we go there to shop. But we also go there to walk. (Some older folks in the desert actually go to shopping malls to walk around multiple times as their daily exercise, since it's much easier to go for a mile walk in an air-conditioned mall than along a strip of desert when the sun is high). We go there to socialize. We go there to eat and play arcade games and watch movies. And we go there to dream of meeting someone special and being asked out.

As my special someone recently quoted to me (from one of my favorite movies, 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High), “All the action’s on the other side of the mall…”