I just had a sudden impulse to go to the mall. Not to buy anything I need, though. Come to think of it, I am not sure the mall has anything anyone actually needs. No, it doesn't, and I guess that's the point of the mall.

Nor do I need anything, from the mall or elsewhere. I have everything I need. More than enough. Too much. Stuff bulges out of drawers, cascades down from shelves when I open closet doors, piles up in the office, garage, breakfast nook. I've got enough stuff.

So why the sudden impulse to go shopping? The answer is simple: escape. Shopping center designers have created environments designed to narcotize customers, transporting us into fantasy realms where every dream can be fulfilled. Omnipresent mirrors encourage narcissism; products offer solutions to feelings of unease. There's no garbage, no backed-up plumbing, no poverty, no responsibility, no politics, no sadness. No reality, in other words.

In fact, the new trend in malls is to create fake downtowns, old bank buildings and beauty shops that never were, now housing Banana Republics, a store that crystallizes everything abhorrent about capitalism, the very name mocking socio-political realities in which elites exploit people for profit.

As we strolled through Victoria Gardens the other evening, which is our local version of this fake Mayberry, I pointed to one of the retro buildings and said to my husband, "ah, mother used to bring me to that salon to get my hair done. That's where I got my first page-boy haircut."

Of course the beauty shop I was pointing to never existed. It's just a fake sign on a fake building pointing to a fake business from a fake past. The mall itself is only a few years old. Yet I felt a strange--and I mean strange in literal meaning of estrangement--feeling of nostalgia, homesickness for a home that never was, poignance over a memory that never really happened.

Yikes. That's life in Postmodern/America!

Freud uses the term "uncanny" to describe this sense of having always/already been estranged from home, for having home- sickness for a home that one never really experienced except in fantasy. He was talking about a psychological state, the impossibility of getting back to a place that is largely a creation of one's memory, but in our society, this inevitable psychic feeling of isolation is promoted by public places like Victoria Gardens, by the reality of creating reality through artifice. We’ve got no past in the United States, so let’s create one where the feelings of estrangement and homesickness can be assuaged by buying, buying, buying.

Ah, but I wax theoretical, which I suppose is another method of escapism. For when I had the impulse to go to the mall (not Victoria Gardens, I might add, which is--gasp--actually outdoors, but to the hermetically-sealed Montclair Plaza, site of my fervid fantasies since childhood), I was already playing Tetris, another form of escapism. Why my full flight from reality this morning?

Dad's dead.

It's really that simple.

Dad’s dead. And yesterday was Father's Day.

Don't know about you, but my organism doesn't relish feeling pain. When I experience dad's absence, it's as if a wind howls through my soul. It's chilling, and I don't like it. So before I get down to those base emotions of loss and sadness, I tend to do a whole bunch of avoidance--without even knowing it. Let's shop! Let's get frustrated! Let's play Tetris! Let’s eat chocolate! Let’s watch the NBA playoffs! Let's run away. Run away. Run away.

But to where?

We are preparing the family home for sale. So I spent yesterday walking through the place that I lived for my entire childhood, the place that was always, always, there, always had parents in it, even after mom's death had at least one parent in it, right up until May 24 when they took his body out on a stretcher.

Gone.

Uncanny.

I found myself touching things as I walked through, as if trying to connect to a past that doesn't exist, never existed. Trying to get to a home that isn't there. I touched the till in the family room, that shelf where I had so many birthday cakes, set so many school projects, fed so many fish, dished up so many Thanksgiving feasts. In touching it, I was trying to touch the past, connect to those times, to that girl, to that family, once 5 in number, now down to 2. Uncanny. Gone. Untouchable. Unreachable.

How do people cope with this? How to deal with the permanence of death, the endings of place, the loss of childhood, the impotence of memory?

Easy. We go shopping.

And lucky for me, Victoria Gardens has created a fake past where I can have fake memories of fake good times with my family. When you get right down to it, these are just about as good as the real thing, because the real past is not "real" either. The mall’s historical lie is only slightly less unreal than the past each of us imagines in our personal psychological landscape, itself a construction of language. Memory's a fiction. That house in Pomona, which my family bought in 1965, doesn't "really" hold memories for me. My mind creates them, shapes them, suits them to my needs. And so my organism desperately tries to cope.

I’m pretty sure that’s why we’ve become a society obsessed with photographing ourselves in the act of whatever. Maybe if we can see images of the party while we are at the party, images of ourselves in our cars, at restaurants, walking down the street, we will be able to believe that we really exist, that this isn’t all just temporary and illusory. Maybe if we fill elaborate scrapbooks with pictures, spend lots of time making them look just perfect, we can convince ourselves that we really exist, that this isn’t all just temporary and illusory.

Heavy. And no wonder one wants to run away. But I'm not really going to go shopping. We've got $26.13 in the bank. That's not what's stopping me, though. Like everybody else, I’ve got plenty of plastic. We're not supposed to stop shopping in the United States, even if we don't have any money. President Bush even told us that shopping is our patriotic duty. So I guess I am committing a radical act by refusing to go and get some more junk made by miserable Chinese prisoners and desperate little children in Bangladesh today. I know that what I really need: to get quiet and feel my grief rather than react to the impulses to run away.

In doing so I am practicing a kind of lazy suburban white girl version of what the Buddhists call "mindfulness." I'm detaching from my thoughts, watching them run, instead of mistaking them for a reality that needs to be heeded and acted upon. This contemplation may not increase the coffers of my local retailers, but it will help me to live a richer and more spiritual existence, even if I have to accept the reality that we are just temporary and illusory.

And that's what I want, a richer and more spiritual existence. Even if to do so I need to feel pain, grieve the losses, accept my own mortality, let go of that notion of “home,” feel the wind howl through my soul.

Uncanny.