A bit of sad personal news.

My mother, Doris Ann Tanier, passed away in the early morning hours on Monday. She died peacefully in her sleep of natural causes. She was 87.

I will need some time to grieve and handle arrangements, of course. If I publish an NFL article this week, it will only be because Power Rankings are 70% written anyway and finishing them will give me something useful to do between other, more difficult tasks. Otherwise, Walkthrough will return next Monday morning.

I will share that during my last conversation with my mother, at the end of last week, she offered the following insight. "Gosh, Jalen is sick with those blood clots, which could have killed him, and now he cannot play football anymore. But the Pope has cancer and can still play tennis! I guess you never know."

I will also republish the following from March of 2025 as a tribute to mom. Thank you for your support and patience.

Off-Topic Topics: Shopping (With) (For) By the Elderly

As a small child, I loved to get lost inside department store garment racks.

The grand East Coast department stores of the 1970s – John Wanamaker’s, Gimbels, Strawbridge & Clothier, Bamberger’s – were like opium dens for my mother. She abandoned all sense of time and responsibility and fell into a numb retail euphoria instantly upon entering one. She often left four-year-old me in the care of my ten-year-old brother in some random aisle as she made a pilgrimage into the women’s apparel section to “look for one or two things” and disappeared for hours, days, months.

These were the days before cellphone games, tablet videos, or even Cadillac strollers that doubled as mobile amusement platforms (toys, snacks, drinks, cleaning supplies, child-strength No Judgement If You Dose Him at Noon-brand sleepy-time sniffle medicine) for squirrelly tykes. A barely-supervised preschooler in a low-stimulus environment was forced to his imagination. And so I did: plunging into the towering cylindrical racks of 1970s fashions in search of jungle adventure, or perhaps Narnia.

A nimble squirt could slip through the skirts or skirt though the slips and arrive in a sort of idyllic glade in the middle of a rack, then tumble out the other side and crawl beneath some slacks and into some more underbrush. In 30 seconds, I could be in the shoe department, or the appliances, or the parking lot. My brother was too big to take the same path but too small to see over the racks to locate me. Mom was busy staring at three identical blouses like a stoner at Coachella mesmerized by his fingers.

Eventually, but not always, I was found and chastised. At least once, I had my mother paged over the store intercom. Approaching a clerk and giving my mother’s full name was a skill I was taught, rather wisely, at an early age.

Mom and my brother turned out to be about 20 paces away. I received a stern lecture – I guess I was supposed to remain lost and frightened – and Mom was mortified, though she managed to keep shopping.

Mom gets her revenge now that she is in her mid-80s.

“I need to go to Boscov’s to pick up a few things,” she told me during a recent visit to her assisted-living community.

“Gosh, Mom: can’t my brother take you? Or one of your old-lady pals who still drive, against their children’s wishes? What about the rickety assisted-living shuttle bus, held together by the statue of Our Lady of Unsnappable Timing Belts on the dashboard?” I stopped short of volunteering my wife’s services; I slept on the porch for a week after her last shopping trip with mom.

“I want to talk to the people in the hearing aid department,” she added, placing me on DEFCON 2.

Mom needs a hearing aid. She had one years ago, an expensive one, but couldn’t manage the battery charger and other basic maintenance functions. We’re working on a better solution. It won’t be a $300 hunk of cheap circuitry and wishful thinking endorsed in department-store circulars by Joe Namath.

“Mom, we are not allowed to purchase a hearing aid without my brother’s approval,” I warned. Claiming I lack the authority to do something I just don’t feel like doing is one of my go-to life skills and most charming personality traits. We can’t stop for ice cream without asking mommy. I cannot change your grade; you have to ask the principal. I cannot research that statistic; you must ask Aaron Schatz. Only Substack can give you a refund.

“Can we at least talk to them?” Mom flashed her dog-in-the-Sara-McLachlan-PSA eyes. She needs the comfort of her Other Church. And she’s not above calling me “Warden” if I don’t acquiesce now and then.

So we retrieve the credit card hidden in her dresser drawer, then the 15% off coupons scattered somewhere on her “dining room table” which is actually an eight-inch deep midden of junk mail, photos of long-deceased family members and perhaps the original Magna Carta.

(Mom refuses to let me tidy up the table. She believes – accurately – that I will snatch the unpaid bills and undeposited checks that she hordes as prized keepsakes. I did manage to pilfer a letter from the Social Security Administration, which I was sure would inform her that she had been declared nonexistent and her checks used for research and development on space dunebuggies whose engines explode if exposed to dust. Luckily, it turns out her benefits are actually going up 0.0004%.)

Forty-five minutes of paper shuffling later, we’re off to do the one thing neither of us liked to do with each other for half a century.

I don’t know why mom shopped with me so often when I was a tyke. My grandmother co-raised me and lived a five-minute drive away, as did some spinster aunts. It’s likely that I was in tow during many mall trips because I also needed clothing, which means I had to try on polyester slacks or church-appropriate sweaters, which guaranteed that I would spend the whole trip, Allan Quartermain excursions through the dress jungle included, in a snot-weasel mood.

This was the golden age of Garanimals, which apparently still exist. Garanimals are a clothing line designed for parents who are worried about their children’s clothing being color-coordinated but are color-blind or lack the fashion sense to not pair an orange shirt with bright purple pants. If a pair of brown corduroy slacks had a little bear on its tag, it only matched with bear tops. Hippos matched hippos, wombats with wombats, like on Noah’s ark.

And yes, little boys wore brown corduroy slacks in the 1970s. Also dark green ones. We all made vvvvvt-vvvvt record-scratch sounds when we walked. Corduroy slacks led directly to the rise of early hip-hop.

My sons never wore Garanimals because it is now easy to find elastic-waisted blue jeans, grey sweats and neutral-color warmup slacks for children, along with superhero or princess tops the children actually like wearing, rather than miniature versions of adult clothes in colors associated with bad acid trips and fabrics best suited for transporting pineapples.

I was also a husky lad; the retail euphemism of the era for a fat kid consigned to wear fat-kid clothes like a disgusting fat kid.

Old photos and other anecdotal evidence reveal that I was only slightly plump – more of the miniature version of an aging first baseman than of an SEC guard in danger of losing his scholarship – but those cute little Garanimals were dead serious about body shaming.

The husky lad section of the department store was in a forlorn corner where other shoppers would not have to interact with the failed parents who weren’t raising sleek future Charlie’s Angels or Green Berets. The selection of Easter sportcoats with lapels wide enough to land a DC-10 was always sparse in the husky department. No wonder mom needed to bathe in the healing waters of the women’s section after finally finding something that fit her recalcitrant little butterball.

The nearest Boscov’s is located in what was once called the Echelon Mall but is now an ancient ruin with one of the last living department stores clinging to its edges like a cargo cult huddled beside the remains of a forgotten civilization.

You must be 50 years or older to enter Boscov’s. They card. It still has tacky glass chandeliers and plays Forgotten Lite R&B of the 1970s at a volume just high enough to confuse an elderly shopper who is between hearing aids. The same dresses I besmirched with my grubby hands in 1975 while searching for El Dorado are still available, at clearance prices.

Fortunately, there is no hearing aid kiosk at this particular store. I express my incalculable disappointment to mom, but she already has that glassy look in her eyes. I make sure she’s securely fastened to the little cart which will double as her walker, then set her free. She is barely five feet tall, so she vanishes as soon as she toddles into the sprawling Summer Fashions for Octogenarians department.

Killing time, I wander over to men’s wear. But my closet is already overflowing with quarter-zip henleys, solid-colored golf shirts, knockoff athletic wear and Burl-E-Dad Capacious Ass-Room jeans. Nothing calls to me.

I think of slipping out of the store, but the Echelon Mall, on life support until recently by virtue of a Yankee Candle retailer, a pizza joint, a karate dojo and one of those county passport processing centers, is now dead, per misericordiam Dei, requiescant in pace. The Boscov’s exit/mall entrance is even sealed.

I stared through the glass at the abandoned shopping complex. As a young teen, I was free to roam while mom shopped. There was a Sam Goody record outlet (which also sold guitar strings), a B. Dalton Bookseller, a Kay Bee Toy & Hobby that carried both Strat-o-Matic products and baseball/football cards, a food court, and in the later 1980s, a Babbage’s computer games and supplies shop. And of course there were girls: 1980s girls, with architectural hair and jeans ripped provocatively at the thigh, all of them dating guys with names like Gambino or Buttafuoco who drove IROCs, had trim waistlines and possessed the self-confidence to actually speak to them.

Mom still took forever to shop in those days, but I could purchase a Bill James Baseball Abstract and get halfway through the National League before she staggered out of Macy’s like Andy Capp out of the pub at closing time. It’s all gone now except the girls, now soon-to-be grandmas guiding their elderly parents through the aisles of Boscovs.

Perhaps 10 minutes had passed; time to check on mom. Long-leash supervision works best with her. The “few things” she needed were purely hypothetical. Her shopping lists tend to read “stamps, toothpaste, call Cousin Carmine, ask Michael to fix the hair dryer, toothpaste.” I tried to make shopping trips more efficient in the past, but that only brought mutual frustration.

“I need white socks,” she once told me when I tried to speed up a shopping excursion. “Not thick ones. Not flimsy ones. Not long or short ones. You know, the good kind.”

I combed the entire store and returned with two-dozen pairs of white socks of every conceivable style in the time she took to examine a checkered blouse in the size she wore before my birth.

“No, not these socks,” she said to all of them. “You know, the good kind.”

Our interactions were always like this. One Christmas Eve, in my Baseball-Abstract-and-ogling adolescence, she implored me to play some of the “pretty” music on our living room stereo while her friends were visiting. I tried the Barbra Streisand album, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Handel’s Messiah, the Nutcracker, the local classical music channel (now-defunct WFLN), even “Merry Christmas, I Don’t Want to Fight” by The Ramones in a burst of exasperation.

“No. You know, the pretty music,” mom said after every selection. I slipped away to a friend’s house to raid his parents’ basement bar.

I lost sight of Mom in Boscov’s during a shopping trip a few months ago. She rounded a bend from the candy shoppe to housewares: an unanticipated detour. I thought about paging her, as I had done so long ago, but realized that she would probably not hear it. I found her contentedly browsing random knick-knacks. I now schedule reconnaissance flybys at regular intervals, close enough to verify her well-being but far enough to not be scolded for “rushing” her, knowing she gets weary and hungry quickly, just as I used to.

Sure enough, she ran out of steam and could be coaxed from Boscov’s with the lure of a trip to the diner for eggs and scrapple. Her bounty of ladies’ wear, some of which might conceivably fit her, came to about 70 dollars after she stacked her discounts. The cost, more-than reasonable by today’s standards, shocked her. I would soon be paying almost as much for two orders of scrapple and eggs.

Mom returned to the home almost delirious with joy: a rare emotional state for a woman of her age, ethnicity and worldview. I was happy, too, for an activity with her that did not escalate into some sort of tantrum or descend into morose recriminations. That must have been how she felt 50 years ago, after she finally extracted me from my base camp within the evening-wear thicket, squeezed me kicking-and-squealing into and out of preschooler-wear, weathered my precocious brattiness, tossed me in the back of the Thunderbird and finally deposited me among my Matchbox cars so she could enjoy a cigarette in the bathroom in peace.

As for Boscov’s: of course that is where I now shop for old-guy non-fashions. I own a credit card and sometimes show up with a paper coupon. I know what’s coming for me. And I am certain that Boscov’s will still be there when my sons are tracking me around the drab flannels department electronically, when my shopping lists include the names of forgotten quarterbacks, when I’m more cantankerous and incorrigible than I am now. And probably long beyond that, perhaps until the end of time: a monument to a abandoned realm; a testament to a forgotten era when busy mothers couldn’t shop by phone; a reminder that it's still beneficial to get out of the house once in a while and look at/touch/smell the things you need to purchase, even if it's inconvenient and aggravating. Inconvenience and aggravation, after all, are part of growing up, growing old, being alive.

But if I ever get too nostalgic for inattentive parents losing track of their feral preschoolers during cursed shopping trips, there’s a Walmart just down the street.