I caught the bus to town yesterday. Town around here means San Luis Obispo. It’s a twenty minute walk and a half-hour bus ride. I arrive two blocks from a slice of mushroom pizza. You can’t buy a slice of pizza anywhere close to here, so by the time I reach town I’ve been salivating for almost an hour. I’m not a huge pizza fan, but I go to town so infrequently that I build up a need for it. One slice with water and I’m set for hours.

I just felt cooped up, not doing anything for Christmas besides dinner at the Vets Hall. And then I realized that The Shape of Water was playing at the Palm. The Palm is our local art house cinema. It was the first solar theater in the United States. It has comfortable new seats, dollar pop corn and reasonable ticket prices. If they ever close, San Luis Obispo will have lost its one culture connection. Everything else is just retail.

The Palm is next door to the picture above which, I think, is a parking lot in progress. They planned to redo this area ten years ago when the financial meltdown cancelled their plans. But in the past few years there’s been a binge of development. Hotels are being constructed around town where there were buildings going slowly empty. We now have more hair salons, dress and shoe shops, and upscale restaurants. This is a college town (CalPoly) and I suspect they hope the students will borrow all the money they can. It’s hard to tell where the money to support these businesses will come from.

After the pizza, the movie, which was stunningly good, and the popcorn, I walked around a bit before catching the bus home. What I take to be the parking lot will support a rather large development, now finished, I think, which contains, yes, a big dress store, a chichi coffee house, an upstairs upscale restaurant with lovely white tablecloths, a CalPoly Alumni Center, and a Williams-Sonoma. Now I like looking at kitchen stuff as much as anyone. I like walking past complicated machinery that does something for hundreds of dollars like boiling eggs, which a pan of wanter on the stove does almost as well. Of course the pan of water doesn’t make the eggs taste quite as good as the expensive machine. A boiled egg that costs hundreds of dollars must taste better. But I read somewhere about an egg timer that goes in the water with the eggs and changes color (or something) to indicate how the yolk is doing. So I asked the sales lady if they had one. “Oh, of course, it’s such a wonderful device.” But she looked and looked and couldn’t find it, and finished by showing me a delightful machine that cooked eggs perfectly every time.

The bigger problem was this. Across the street from Williams-Sonoma is the venerable Forden’s, a kitchen supply store that has been there since the dawn of time. My tea pots came from there. They special ordered one in a color I liked. You could always find a gift there, and advice on a wide range of things. They tended to remember their customers. You could also buy Heath ceramics. Expensive, but worth every penny. It was a class operation. There was a big For Lease sign on the front yesterday. Williams-Sonoma closed them down.

So when it turns out that one more upscale restaurant can’t make it, that girls at CalPoly can only afford to buy so many new dresses and new pairs of shoes per quarter, and people get tired of the snootiness at the coffee house, will the CalPoly Alumni Center and Williams-Sonoma continue to hold down the fort, or will they fade away like all the others?