Mallory's Camera

Met up with the fabulous BB at Da Tang, the fabulous Chinese grocery store in Middletown.

Middletown is something of a Falun Gong hive, and judging from the number of Falun Gong brochures at the check-out counter, Da Tang is run by Gongers.

This is one of the reasons why I love grubby little cities in the middle of nowhere that are scrambling to keep up with the present tense: They're magnets for all kinds of weirdness!

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Middletown is plopped down right in the middle of Farm Country. (This time of year, you can actually smell the manure they use to fertilize the fields before they sow the corn.) It developed as a distribution hub and processing center for farm products, and reached its mercantile heights between the late 19th century and the beginning of World War II when the Erie Railroad downtown yard bustled with freight cars. The big industries were tanneries and condensed milk. But there were myriad shops where the farm families bought their dry goods and shoes.

Then gasoline-fueled trucks became the distribution method of choice, and everything decentralized; the farmers bought automobiles and began shopping in more convenient stores on the edges of town, and those edges metastasized into strip malls that are now—ironically—harder to get to than the downtown.

In the late 1950s, practically every city in the U.S. caught Urban Renewal Fever and began tearing down the old historic structures, replacing them with ugly commercial buildings and parking lots, or not replacing them at all. Thus, downtown Middletown today is a veritable warren! The Da Tang grocery is just one of dozens of unexpected universes behind nondescript walls. BB goes shopping there several times a month.

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Here are some of the things you can buy at the Da Tang grocery:

Quail eggs:




Delectably alien dried fruit:



Hello Kitty candy:



In fact, every one of the thousands of items in the store is deliciously strange and intriguingly provenanced.

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Afterwards, we looked around for a place to drink caffeinated beverages and jaw. We didn't want to go back to the Falun Gong café!

We passed a sign in the window of a shabby once-industrial window: Tranquili-Tea: Calm Your Mind.

A calm mind is good, right?

We decided to go in.

And found ourselves in a strange little winding hall decorated with glittering lights and mucho eye-pleasing kitsch that led into this cavernous room:



A most delightful tea parlor! Where they bake their own extremely scrumptious scones and offer a dozen different kinds of tea, which they then let you brew to your own desired strength using these adorable miniature hourglasses:



What a find this place is! (As my beloved Marybeth used to say.) A secret garden.

Though I suspect it's not gonna stay in business very long because I can't imagine there's much demand for magical, down-the-rabbit-hole tea gardens in grubby little cities like post-industrial Middletown.



Bade farewell to BB and scurried off to the gym.

Good workout, and on the way home, I had one of those... what would you call them? experiences? episodes?... where all-of-a-sudden, the world seems to shimmer with a golden light and the fallow fields and ancient barns I drive through seem infused with heartbreaking beauty, and the world seems like a good place—even though I know it isn't.