Dear Diary:
Walking up Columbus Avenue one recent evening, I fell in alongside a tall man with long strides, salt-and-pepper porcupine hair and a face I instantly recognized as that of a former clerk at Video to Go, a once-popular video rental store on Broadway and 88th Street.
He was British and reminded me of Monty Python’s Eric Idle, but seeing him took me back to the late 1980s, when my two older children were toddlers and the sum of our evenings and weekends were spent watching “Mary Poppins,†“Old Yeller†and other family movies pulled from Video to Go’s flimsy shelves.
It was a loosely managed place with no coherent system for stocking titles, but you could always find something of interest â€" including a great selection of foreign films â€" and get out of there in a hurry. It was a browser’s paradise. This particular fellow let me slide numerous times whenever I returned a tape a day or two overdue, not docking me the late fee.
“Didn’t you used to work at Video to Go?†I asked, eager to thank him for all those favors.
He sized me up as if about to say something disdainful, but instead replied, “Seven-nine-nine, four-oh nine-oh.â€
I was amazed â€" he had just recited my phone number from 25 years ago, which was Video to Go’s way of tracking customer accounts. He told me he wasn’t great with names but had dozens of phone numbers in his head associated with former customers, many of whom he still encountered. He asked if I still had the same number. I told him we had had to give it up during one of our moves, though I had recently checked and it was actually not assigned.
He gave me a cheery goodbye, noting that I would remain 799-4090 in his book.
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