John Wise

Six years ago today, I received a phone call from a Texas number. I normally wouldn’t answer an unidentified number from anyone, but my ex-wife was living in Texas, so maybe she was calling from a different number? I couldn’t have been more wrong. Yes, it was regarding Sheila, but not in a good way. I was given the news meant for my daughter, who was in Bahrain, but nobody could get hold of her, and they figured I might be able to get in touch. I was drawn into the most difficult call I ever had to make. My daughter’s mom had died in a car accident only a few hours before. As much as the call crushed Jessica, it gripped my gut deeply to have to convey the grim message. At only 50 years old with a ton of unrealized dreams, my ex-wife and mother to my daughter was no more.

Sheila Darlene Clark became Sheila Wise back in 1986, and by 1989, our marriage was over. It took a few years of quiet between the two of us before she reached out to me to remind me of the importance of Jessica needing me in her life. With that nod that Sheila and I could talk and do so easily, Jessica and I started to write one another, and when I moved back to the United States, we made arrangements for her to come out to Phoenix, Arizona, to see each other face to face for the first time in over five years.

Sheila had remarried well before my return and, sadly, was with a very controlling and jealous spouse. While this complicated the two of us talking about the welfare of our daughter, Sheila would arrange to reach out while she was at work, and Jessica’s step-siblings knew to identify the caller as a fellow student instead of her father. Through Jessica’s occasional medical and dental emergencies, a difficult husband, and a daughter starting to rebel, Sheila was always upbeat, remaining positive that things could only get better. In our phone calls, we maintained the same goofy banter we’d always had from the day we started dating through the first few years of Jessica’s life. One thing was obvious through all of this: Sheila enjoyed being a mom, and nothing could diminish her enthusiasm to dream of what was yet to come.

The day she died, I felt horrible for the things she’d never know, and worse, my daughter had to respond from thousands of miles away to the devastating reality that her mom had passed far too young. Sheila is never far from my thoughts as our travels to Paris, Amsterdam, Athens, Madrid, Innsbruck, Cologne, and various points in between, along with bringing a child into the world, forever cemented our connection to each other’s lives. It truly is sad that this important part of my past is now gone in all but memory.

The mundanity of going to a mall cannot be exaggerated as I feel absurd that I’d even step in one. I did not visit out of nostalgic sensibilities. Instead, I ventured inside out of morbid curiosity. Two years ago, during the heat of our summer days, I would walk a few miles inside this particular mall before its shops opened, and even back then, it was ghost-town-like as only about 35 shops were still in business. Today, as I pulled up, I saw that Macy’s and Dillard’s were soon to be closing, while J.C. Penny offered no hint about their future.

Once inside, I was shocked at just how empty things were. We are in a pandemic; what did I expect? I honestly don’t know, but I guess I thought that, somehow, people would be holding on and getting by. Nope, they bailed out. Now, the mall is destined for the wrecking ball with the owner promising some new mixed-use residential higher-end shopping hybrid thing. Wow, great idea, more $3,500-a-month, 750 sqft. 1-bedroom apartments because in America’s future, everyone will be making $120,000 a year and can easily afford those kinds of rents. Do you sense my incredulity, my tiny bit of pessimism, a little bit of uncertainty? I suppose what I should do is simply admit that I do NOT understand our current economic model of ever-inflating asset prices that drive the illusion of wealth, which in turn diminishes a larger percentage of people’s opportunity to have some security of being sheltered.

So, who else sees the writing on the wall that shopping locally is becoming a thing of the past? Sure, today, people shop locally due to economic limitations, but as more people move to online shopping, the prices of sending goods to our homes or having us pick up packages at distribution points will become even more affordable and commonplace. Restaurants? Seriously, how much longer can the low-brow shit that passes for restaurant fare be compatible with our palates? Sometimes, I feel that half the restaurants in the Phoenix area have stuffed jalapenos, onion rings, chicken wings, avocado toast, and burgers as a kind of children’s menu for adults. But what does this have to do with a dying mall?

What replaces this dead zone will just be another set of dead ideas after a short while because those financing this high-priced “luxury” have no real ideas of what people want. So, instead of dreaming up quality-of-life conditions for the masses, they take aim at what they think the people want and run with that. Meanwhile, the masses are pushed further and further to the fringe, where they subsist on fast food, paying over-priced rent to corporations who buy up homes in the tens of thousands and stay well away from the places where the well-to-do live. Although the poor are invited in for the menial tasks and service industry low-pay jobs, the wealthy are allowed to luxuriate, oblivious to the conditions of where we are pushing those who are less fortunate. Back in the day, these malls acted as equalizers, offering communities a kind of luxury that all too often these days become eyesores reminding people of the good old days and how their environment is turning to blight.

Here I am at the coffee shop because I seemingly cannot write at home, and I’m coming up empty on something to write about, which turns out to be something to write about. I don’t want to jump the gun about our first anniversary of living in a modified quarantine during a pandemic, but I suppose I inadvertently kind of announced that as an upcoming subject for a post. As I write this, it occurs to me I could proofread another one of the three draft posts that are either waiting for a photo or for Caroline to take her editing talons out to shred what I thought was intelligible.

Maybe I can distract myself by talking with someone who might, in turn, inspire something to tumble from my fingertips, but that I find inspiration instead of distraction is pretty unlikely. In these moments I often turn to a book, but knowing I was going to hit the keyboard running to throw down something magnificent, I left my book at home. I have Radical Animism – Reading for the End of the World by Jemma Deer as a .pdf here in my notebook, but I’m here to write. Or am I really here to look around at my environment, hoping something will jump into my head?

Checking on a dozen or more of the 25 tabs I have open in this browser offers a 5-minute respite from the struggle to write, but that starts to hint that I should give up and head home, whereas while I haphazardly stumble from distraction to distraction I’ll at least be near Caroline who I can pester, plus she’s usually full of hugs. Hmmm, hugs sound pretty good about now, and this is obviously going nowhere. Time for hugs.