I haven’t done one of these style posts in a while.
Where I’m living now is around the Wawa – Turkey Hill borderline of southcentral Pennsylvania. These are popular convenience stores here, that never quite got franchised into something over in Japan–like Seven Eleven.
I have fond memories of Wawa from the years I spent in Philadelphia. It was probably one of the few good things about the city. In those days, though, you usually had to dodge a guy bumming for change in front of the store. In the far suburbs of Philadelphia, and in exurbs like Lancaster, there are no Wawa Bums. But there is a bit of a demarcation line between Wawa territory and Turkey Hill land. I think my neighborhood is firmly Turkey Hill, but there is a Wawa in Ephrata.
What I like about our Turkey Hill is that the place probably has not been updated since the 1980’s, and the music played inside is now what is called “classic rock”. I don’t think I’ve heard any song later than 1989, and so it’s like stepping back in time to my youth, when I was spending enough at the convenience stores around Penn that one of them should be named after me–or at least an aisle.
The other night, the random song as I went in to get a TastyKake was Eddie Money’s “Baby Hold On”.
For a few minutes, I’m not the middle-agish guy of the year 2011; but the college student of 1986.
It’s funny that the generations of those days used to deride rock-and-rollers along with the hippies of the Vietnam War and other youth culture symbols. But now, all of this is classic–they don’t write ’em like that anymore.