The local movie theater just held its final screenings this past Sunday. The old theater, by the old mall, which closed down 20-some-odd years ago and has just been sitting there untouched ever since. That theater was the only game in town for a lot of my youth, so if there was something to be seen, we'd see it there. To see the theater off, Iztyping and I elected to go see Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle. It's part of the Demon Slayer anime series, of which Iz is a fan, and which I've never seen a second of. He got a lot out of it, but as for myself, it was a gruelling three hours. Yes, three hours. I knew I'd probably be lost the whole time, but I wish I'd checked the runtime before agreeing to see it. Regardless, it was probably still more fun than Downton Abbey or Dude Perfect.
Now, I'm hardly movie buff — in the last ten years, I probably went to the theater, ANY theater, once or twice annually, even when I was getting unlimited free movie tickets when I worked under the same parent company. It's just sad to see yet another staple business of my youth leave us. In January, the Gamestop closed. A store my brothers and I visited as often as possible in our youth, which I still stopped into occasionally, and where as a teen I was employed for all of about four days, until there was a change of management, then an embezzlement scandal, then for whatever reason, I was suddenly no longer in their files as an employee. I'm still confused about that one.
Two more painful closures in recent years were both members of the Pizza family. I believe it was two years ago when the Little Caesars closed. The local store popped up in my teen years, and being cheap and close to my family home, it was a frequent dinner and nearly always the go-to for parties. Despite the frequency with which we ate the stuff, it never seemed to get old. A few years prior in 2020, covid killed my beloved Pizza Hut buffet. For decades, that was one of the best places to go for lunch. As a kid, I'd always beg my parents for a quater or two, or however much a bouncy ball cost from the machine by the entrance. I have fond memories going there on into my adulthood as well. A friend of mine used to hold some baseless grudge against me when we first met, and as I recall, we buried the hatchet in a red faux-leather booth.
In the corner of the shopping plaza where Little Caesars was stood the Burger King, which to invoke covid again, was quite often my lunch during lockdown. At that time, they graciously expanded their dollar menu and offered free delivery for orders over $10. With bacon cheeseburgers priced at a buck each, you can guess what my orders looked like. I'd fill the fridge with the things and eat them for days. Twenty years prior to that, I don't know if us kids disliked the other fast food places or what, but I recall having BK a lot as a kid. I feel like they had the best kids' meal toys around that time, too. I mean, they scored the rights to produce Pokemon premiums before any other fast food place, and they went INSANE with it. In 1999 alone, they released over 50 Pokemon premiums, including collectable 24k gold cards inside shiny metallic Poke Balls which could be used as displays for the cards. Good food and arguably even better toys. That Burger King quietly closed its doors around two months ago.
"The world you grew up in is dead." That's a phrase I encounter on occasion, primarily if not exclusively online. I've always hated it. It's sad to see the things we cherish go, but how naïve to say that the entire world is dead without them. The town is still alive without the old movie theater, and the little kid version of me who used to go to that theater is still alive inside me. It's sad to see it and those other childhood haunts go away, but they still left their mark on me, my friends and this place. Things change, and they go away, but we can always remember them and let those memories shape us. I have warm memories of all those places. Stargazing at the skate park after hours with good friends and a Little Caesar's pizza. My parents surprising me with a Hershey pie from Burger King. Seeing every movie I could at the old theater because it just felt better than the new one. I could just as easily go on and mention other places that were important to me which ceased to be, like the skating rink and my dad's own restaurants, but I mostly wanted to touch on the places that closed more recently.
It's sad to say goodbye, but there will always be more theaters. More fast food places. More game stores. More memories.
TruKuu tells me that the Burger King mentioned above isn't closed permanently—it caught on fire! In fact, he didn't just tell me. He showed me video of the inferno! It sounds like it'll open back up after some remodeling, and especially now that I've gone on my nostalgic rant about it, I hope that's true. After all, I could use a Whopper with cheese and some onion rings.