For huge swathes of my life, I have been a military dependent. I shopped at the BX before I had any understanding that not all department stores were BXes. I bet I didn’t even know what the letters stood for (Base Exchange) until I was well out of childhood. Once I was raising my own kids, these stores were better than Walmarts for me. They had basically everything we needed at a reasonable quality, and they were tax free. That last bit saved us quite a few dollars on appliances and electronics over the years. Good deals at Christmas, too. I even taught myself to say “PX” and “NEX” when we lived in heavy concentrations of folks from other branches.
Since the Mr retired from service, I’ve barely set foot on a base. The closest one is at least an hour away, in normal traffic. But last year, a couple of days after my surgery, my ID card expired. I didn’t figure it out until I was more than halfway through chemo. I didn’t want to drive all the way down while I was feeling bad, and I certainly didn’t want to have my picture taken while I was bald. So I kept plugging away with an expired card. Not one of those medical office managers who scanned it since had said a word about the expired date. I guess as long as my insurance still paid, they were fine with it. Today was my day to get legal again, so to speak. I made an appointment days ago, and we drove all the way to SE Denver to Buckley to visit the MPF. It’s a good thing I made an appointment. As we were parking, they put up a note that said, in effect, “We are full. If you don’t have an appointment, and don’t sign in by 11:00, don’t bother.” But I planned ahead, so I was fine. My new card is good for another four years. Four years of remembering how I walked around town with a short wolf pelt on my head (my hair is tragically weird right now) and I just got used to it.
We went to the BX both before and after the appointment. He was in search of a new laptop, and I had decided it was time to attach a DVD player to the upstairs TV. He didn’t settle on a computer, but I picked a mid-priced player for myself. I went back and forth on how good of one to get. I never bought all that many Blu-rays, but I own enough that it would have been dumb not to get a player that can take both. But I already have all the streaming apps on the television, so I didn’t care whether the player had built-in WiFi. Not hooking it up to the internet. I just want to be able to play some discs upstairs, and I want a machine that I’m not emotionally invested in, so that if in a few years a toddler pulls it to the ground and smashes it, I would merely be disappointed. It feels like I took a giant leap backwards to tech from the early two-thousandsies.
The whole day felt nostalgic. It was weird being on a base. The gate guards intimidated me more than they used to. I felt conspicuous in the MPF, like I didn’t fit in anymore. I was eavesdropping on a couple very (very) young spouses, and their conversation seemed timeless to me, and not in ways that were entirely comfortable to hear. We grabbed breakfast at the Commissary, and being there was a freaky trip too. And even though tech and styles and media have changed dramatically, the wares at the BX, while essentially current and modern, still felt very specific and peculiar. Are we sure it’s not 1998 anymore?
And while I was trying to get a decent picture of the logo on the bag, I had two helpers decide they needed to be in the photo:
No comments:
Post a Comment