There was a time before the internet and Amazon when you really had to shop! I mean like having to physically leave your house and drive to a store or even a few stores to find what you were looking for.
It’s getting more and more difficult to remember that not so long ago it may have taken a few days or even a few weeks to move from desire to delivery and convert urge to splurge with just a few mouse clicks or taps on your smart phone.
This isn’t a story so much about how times have changed but it is one I cherish and today probably would not have happened. It’s about a watchband and the old central bus station in Tel Aviv and my mother.
I once interviewed a Costco executive and before we started he asked me a question.
“How many things are you wearing right now that were bought at Costco?”
“Well, my underwear, my socks, maybe this shirt and these pants… and this watch. I guess that counts.”
The guy from Costco nailed me as a devotee/junkie and even after someone was murdered in front of the store in Van Nuys I shopped at I didn’t stay away. Where else could you buy a great barbecued chicken for dinner and a Montblanc pen at the same time?
The Costco watch I was wearing was a Casio solar atomic powered model that cost maybe $50 but made me feel like I was out there on the cutting edge of technology with something spawned from a sun dial and a nuclear submarine.
One day the watchband broke and I went to a big department store looking for a replacement for it. The Broadway carried Casios and had watchbands but didn’t have the one my watch came with so I bought a different one. It didn’t have the usual sprocket holes. It was a couple of Velcro strips and rather quickly frayed and got fuzzy looking.
I looked in other places and no one had my watch’s exact watchband so I tried other types and none of them felt comfortable.
In the 1970s I had lived in Israel for seven years on a kibbutz. Part of the time I worked in Tel Aviv and commuted 40 miles each way every day on the bus. The Tel Aviv central bus station wasn’t in the best part of the city but all around it was a maze of tiny shops and places to eat, some no wider than a doorway.
You could find almost anything there and I had a trip back to Israel coming up and figured what the hell… It literally took me five minutes to find what I thought could be the possible epicenter of a watchband motherlode less than a hundred yards from where I had gotten off the bus. The shop was tiny and windowless and had so many watches and clocks that if they had all been keeping the same time and their alarms set to go off simultaneously, it would have been deafening.
I showed an old man behind the counter my watch. In seconds he was back with a shoebox full of the precise watchband I had been unable to find in Los Angeles. I bought one and left with a huge smile and a story I couldn’t wait to impress my mother with.
When I got back to the United States I called her first thing and I kvelled (Yiddish for to burst with pride) about my resourcefulness and perseverance.
I finished and there was a long silence on the other end of the line… Then these words.
“So, did you buy two?”
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