The opening

To my young eyes, the Berkshire Mall looked from the outside like a giant spaceship, not one continuous and smooth shape, but like one of those vast ships from Battlestar Galactica or Star Wars, that rumbled on and on and seemed to be comprised of a million parts of differing shapes and sizes. I vividly recall pushing aside the doors at the entrance and beholding the glorious vision – Sweet William’s Ice Cream Shop. Those bottomless tubs filled with so many vivid colors of ice cream. The billowing heavenly clouds of whipped cream.

My favorite sundae was an upside-down cone in a dish made to look like a clown. It had one giant scoop of chocolate ice cream for the head, a generous puff of whipped cream for the frills around the neck, various confectionary bits situated to represent a smiling face, and a cherry pierced on the cone to top it all off. Not once did I ever reflect on the absurdity of eating the representation of the head of a Black clown.

I threw birthday parties, played endless hours of video games, and smoked my first cigarette at the Mall. The climate was controlled, the pathways smooth and perfectly even, the delights and comforts plentiful, the strains of Muzak playing gently overhead. From within those walls, the concerns of the maddening globe outside appeared distant, unreal.

In the middle of the Mall was a bookstore with giant glowing white backlit letters – Waldenbooks. And in the heart of that bookstore under the luminescence of florescent bulbs overhead was my sanctum – the Philosophy & Religions section. There, sitting cross-legged on the floor with books stacked around me, is where my decades-long, six-thousand mile journey began.