Strange In The Night-At Bishop's Corner

When I was a kid, my family lived near the Bishops Corner shopping center in West Hartford. The four-part Bishops Corner shopping area has lots of different commercial tenants than the ones who were there in the late 1960s and '70s.

A Walgreens pharmacy now sits where a Finast supermarket used to be. Next to the supermarket were an S&H green stamps store, a Friendly's restaurant where my friends and I would leave open ketchup packets on the floor and watch people step on them, and a Bradlees department store.

In the northeast section of the shopping center sits a BIG Y supermarket. When I was a kid, the store was known as Grand Union supermarket, then it became a Waldbaum's Food Mart supermarket for many years. The store has been operating as a Big Y outlet for quite a few years now.

When I worked for Mobile Redemptions as a truck driver for more than a decade, the Bishop's Corner Waldbaum's store was one of the more challenging stores on my route. After taking the deposit bottles and cans out of the store for numerous years, I went to work for Waldbaums-Bishops Corner for a few months.

For about the past three years, the Bishop's Corner Big Y has been the supermarket that I shop at most frequently.  Last night, I stopped to take a couple of drags from a smoke outside the store, and suddenly, a short, somewhat-unkempt-looking man came walking up to where I was standing. The man was holding a pair of dark-colored work boots in his hands.

The man looked at me and just said "Wolverines?" He said "Look, good condition, I'll sell them to you, cheap."

All I could say was "no, man." The guy didn't press the situation any further, and I finished the cigarette. The last I saw, he was talking to another customer. I certainly don't want to think that the guy was selling his own boots. Maybe he found them somewhere.  Yeah, that's the ticket.