September 10

This lone business is all that is left of Monterey Shopping Center.

When I was a kid, and before the South Plains Mall opened, Monterey Shopping Center and its neighbor, Caprock Shopping Center, were the places to shop. They had everything you could want - clothes, shoes, books, groceries. Caprock was a little more classy, but I was sort of partial to Monterey Center, because it had these amazing glazed bricks. There were entire walls of them, and other places there were groupings of two or three or nine bricks. Their colors - black, red, orange, green, blue - were set off nicely by the sandy tone of the rest of the bricks.

But my favorite thing was that the glazed bricks always felt cool. I loved to place my flat palm on them for a moment as I passed by, hurried by my mom between errands at the dime store and the pharmacy.

Lubbock, Texas