Park and Shop, A Love Story

By Anne Chudobiak

We’ve all heard it before. Bloggers are bad writers with big egos. They go on and on about themselves without any thought to their readers.

I might be a bad writer with a big ego, but I will never forget the readers. If anything, blogging has made them more real to me. Never before have they made themselves so obvious, with their ISP numbers in our site meter, with their comments or lack thereof. This is not a diary. If it was, I wouldn’t feel the need to pitch my blog ideas to my husband, like I did before posting last week.

“You remember how when my grandma died, my mom asked us if there was anything of hers that we would like, and me and my brother both asked for exactly the same thing?”

“No,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “You do. It was that board game, Park and Shop.”

Park and Shop was released in 1960 by Milton Bradley. It was billed as “The Nation’s Traffic Game Sensation,” the object of which was to “drive your car from your home to the nearest Park & Shop parking lot, park your car, then move your pedestrian marker to all the stops on your shopping list.” There really wasn’t that much more to it, which is perhaps why it was never re-released.

The game was mentioned in the New Yorker last week. The article (by Jill Lepore) was about another Milton Bradley invention, the Game of Life. In the 60s version of that game, players manoeuvred tiny station wagons stuffed with plastic-peg representations of themselves—pink for girls, blue for boys—around a board, acquiring degrees, money, insurance, investments and progeny along the way. People like me who grew up playing that game have exceedingly sentimental feelings about it, even though it’s all about being a good consumer in a consumerist society, and could have easily gone the way of other equally vapid and immoral games, like Park and Shop: “Who still plays Park and Shop?” Lepore asks, the point being that nobody remembers that game, except for me and my brother. This, I told my husband, would be the basis of my next blog.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “What do you want to say about Park and Shop?”

“That my favourite board game got mentioned in the New Yorker as being totally forgotten, and it’s not.”

“That’s it?”

“Is that not enough?”

“I think you need an angle. You could make it into a social commentary. Talk about how weird it is that generations of kids have grown up playing games that promote questionable ideals.”

“But the New Yorker already did that. And they did it really well. They went back centuries. They talk about board games in England and in India. They talk about babies dying violent deaths, choking on hot coals, in the colonies. I can’t fit all of that into my blog. It’s too much.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. You can write about Park and Shop, but none of your readers are going to have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, except for maybe your brother. Is that what you want?”

Of course I didn’t want to subject readers to a sub-par post about a minor Milton Bradley game. I would find a more exciting topic, the kind of thing that anyone could relate to, something like Middlemarch, sexism and hockey—that would do it! I could still write about Park and Shop, but in my diary. Not every reflection was meant to be shared with the world.