an old memory

every now and then i remember the russian food store my parents went to a few times when i was a kid. it was so long ago, and i wasn't yet interested in remembering places, that the memory consists of a few shadowy images. the store is in a brookline-like area; we would go there at night because both of my parents were working at the time. the store was tiny, and wonderful for children. i remember the place as being kind of dim, but perhaps that just because it's memory? there were wire racks and aisles that were piled with multitudes of things i had never seen before. we went there specifically to buy the candy - chocolates. plain chocolate, chocolate with some sort of praline filling, chocolate with nougat...essentially it was a plastic sack - the kind you put vegetables in at the supermarket, filmy and translucent - filled with colorful, foil-wrapped pieces of candy in all sorts of random shapes like rectangular prisms and cones. you could stick your hand in the bag, pull something out, and you wouldn't know what it was because it didn't say on the foil, and the text that was on it was always a place - odessa - or in an alphabet i couldn't read. but you knew that whatever it was, it was going to be new and exciting.