Ryan's Childhood Memories - The BiWay

Now that I'm a parent, I can look back on parts of my own childhood and reflect upon those things that irritated me as a child and how I'll apply those feelings to the raising of my own children.

I essentially have two options:
1. Remember how I felt as a kid and allow myself to not treat my children the same,
or
2. Remember how I felt as a kid, say to hell with it, and be just like my awesome parents were.

Maybe I'm being too vague.  I am, of course, referring to shopping at the Bi-Way.

The power and the glory of the Bi-Way

If you don't know what the Bi-Way was then, maybe, your soul will never truly reach heaven.  I'm no expert on these biblical things.

I do, however, have many memories of shopping at the Bi-Way with my mother.  The Bi-Way was a discount department store.  Your first thought might be to compare it with Walmart, and while I generally don't enjoy going to Walmart you can't compare the two.  Sit down for a second, because this analogy might make you uncomfortable.

When comparing the two department stores, Walmart is like champagne and Bi-Way was half a bottle of leftover shitty wine that had been sitting in the sun for three days after an outdoor engagement party for a couple who got a divorce three weeks after their wedding day.

And my mom insisted on buying my clothes at The Bi-Way.  It's a wonder I didn't get beat up and picked on more than I did as a kid.

Again, if you've never been inside a Bi-Way or you're too young to know about it then you really don't understand.  I'm talking about pants that had different lengths to their legs.  And not because that was some weird early 90s yo-mtv-raps fad... these products were so shitty in design and execution that you could purchase them for 99 cents and Bi-Way was still making a profit.

Venture Force shoes.  Anyone? Yeah, that's right - if you remember them, then you're also hiding those emotional scars inside, aren't you?

I don't know why all my clothes came from Bi-Way.  I mean, when my mother would inevitably wash them with the laundry detergent she bought at the Bi-Way, they'd all seem to just disintegrate.  So then it would be another trip, off to the Bi-Way for some new t-shirts on the $1.49 rack.

I don't want to sound overly negative, as I actually DO have some fond memories of Bi-Way.

For example:
1. My favorite hockey stick ever came from Bi-Way, was only 99 cents, and was covered in Russian text that I couldn't understand.  But, at the tender age of eleven, having that stick made me feel like I could shoot like Sergei Federov.  The other kids made me play goalie though because I was fat.
2. The Bi-Way we frequented was right next to the food court, so I could always convince my mom to stop at Yogen Fruz afterwards.
3. When I had naked pictures of me developed for Ryan Fan Club Newsletter #3 back in 1998, they were developed at Bi-Way.  Yep, some poor Bi-Way employee saw me with no clothes on.  I hope she isn't overly scarred to this day.  Or he.  I never until this very moment considered that a dude might have developed those photos.

So there we have it.  Bi-Way.  It's gone.

- ryan