Gallina Centro

Gallina Centro

Gallina Centro? We were there on Saturday. It sounds like some trendy fashion boutique, but is actually the name of a new mall in Memphis, a mall
so new that it is not really there yet. These new urban units get plunked down complete in the middle of what is still basically the countryside on the edge of the rapidly expanding city. The beginning of the life-cycle of such urban units is ghostlike --we have all seen ghost towns, towns that are still there physically, but from which most life has departed. Here, the
life has not yet even arrived. Gallina Centro -- literally Chicken Center -- really is out there with the chickens. The infrastructure is all there.
There is an apparently fully-stocked Krogers grocery store and a Walgreens, but there are no cars in the massive parking lot, and weeds are still growing in the planed and cleared slots into which other commercial giants will ultimately insert their units. Then simply add people and you will have another bit of Memphis just like the bits next to it.
We stumbled into this fantasy world in the search of Circuit City. I know. This is a big chain. My printer had died and I needed a new one
desperately. I even paid for one in another Circuit City in another part of Memphis that had once been a ghost unit on the outskirts too but has since been incorporated into the normalcy of the megalopolis. But they were out of
the unit and I was supposed to pick what I had purchased up at their new outlet on Giacosa Drive -- what is it with these Italian-sounding names?
"You can't miss it! On the left as you drive out Germantown." Now there is only one main drag through Germantown, I thought, so that sounded easy enough.
When I checked my map though, Giacosa Drive was not yet on it. That is what a two-year old map will do in this modern urban development. Indeed, little of what we were passing through was on the map yet. It was a city that was not really there yet. Very eery.
Gallina Centro seemed like a suitable name, but there was no Circuit City (yet). When was I supposed to pick up this printer? and how long would it take to build and stock the new store? Maybe if we just waited...
No, the main drag really was still short one Giacosa Drive. We tried a couple of the lesser drives -- several of which have the same name with a slightly different qualifier: Poplar, Old Poplar, Poplar Pike, Poplar Pike Extd. Our search pattern became more extensive. It is easy to drive in this new fantasy-land with its four to six lane roads and little traffic.
Soon we hit a name we knew -- though way out of place. Winchester. There was a gas station -- a huge gas station mystically filled with people
(perhaps all looking for Circuit City too). An attendant seemed to know where it was immediately. "Follow that road (Winchester) for three or four lights and it is on the left. You can't miss it." We did. Or rather it must
have been for six or seven lights. We passed several Seessals grocery stores.
It was a surreal experience.
And then there we were at Circuit City -- as Angela pointed out -- again. It was not just identical, however (they are all identical), it was the same one. We were back where we had started some thirty miles earlier.
No one from the store could point out to me on a map where the new store was (or would be). I had not taken the wheelchair in to ask this, I thought, simple question, and was getting a little anxious. Indeed, it was ultimately
another customer who told me. He even pointed on the map -- not to Giacosa Drive, as that drive really was not on the map yet -- but to where it was or would be. Not in Germantown -- that I had pretty much established -- but off Germantown road, some fifteen miles and just past Interstate 40. "You can't miss it ..." Why do they all say that?
I do not know why I trusted this guy -- a stranger with no responsibility in the matter. How did he know where this mysterious place
was so readily and how could he pinpoint it on a map so confidently when the store people looked at the map like some alien contraption?
But we did go and we did find the store and they did have the printer and it does work and it is all good -- albeit it was marked as costing "only $249" and having a $50 mail-in rebate but in fact the printer has no cable
(a USB cable costing $30), one needs, or should need (I opted not to) a splitter for 49.99, the replacement warrantee -- a necessity -- was a
further 48.99 and taxes, so we passed $350, and you have to buy a new computer to get the rebate. The idea of finding a place to buy a new
computer just to get the rebate somehow boggles my mind, so I am left with Gallina Centro. Somehow, this place haunts my imagination.