Matthew Burnette, Staff Writer

A pocket full of birthday money and a temporary lack of supervision can be a dangerous combination for a kid under the age of 10 as I learned the hard way in my youth.

We took a trip to one of our local branches of the now defunct and sorely missed multimedia retailer Hastings just to look around on a weekend night and give us something to do.

One of my favorite parts about a store like Hastings is that they had something for everyone. If you liked books, they had those. A movie fan? There was plenty to choose. Music? A-plenty. Video games? Yep, they had those too.

This was during a time between the “Do you know where your children are?” era of the 70s and 80s and the helicopter parenting of the late 2000s where we were free to roam in public places as long as we were in the same vicinity as one of our parents or could quickly return to them if called upon.

In my solo browsing through the music section, I came across a collection of cassettes on the shelf, and one of them immediately caught my attention.

It was a copy of the 1986 Robin Williams standup special Live at the Met. Now, if you don’t know anything about his standup, let’s just say it wasn’t targeted towards preadolescents. Rather blue, to put it mildly.

Unfortunately, I was old enough to recognize the name Robin Williams from some of my favorite movies like Aladdin and Mrs. Doubtfire but too young to understand what a parental advisory sticker meant.

I grabbed the tape and brought it up to the register where a cashier gladly rang it up for me. We then reconvened as a family, and I showed both my parents what I had purchased as we walked through the parking lot.

“There’s no way you’re listening to that” is the phrase that I believe came from my mom’s mouth as soon as she saw what it was. I immediately threw a fit because I had wasted my money on something I couldn’t even enjoy.

It wasn’t until I was much older and came across a clip of the special that I realized that she made the right call that night.

This is just one of the many memories that I have from my youth of me and my family on one of our “just looking” trips.

Often on a Friday night we’d find ourselves going out to a quick dinner and then finding a store to just go walking around for an hour so.

We’d either find ourselves at a big box store like Walmart or K-Mart (another lost gem from my youth), a store like Hastings, a video store, a mall or whatever other random retailers we could find.

If we had our own money, we were okay to spend it on things we found that we wanted, and occasionally we could talk our parents into getting us something small or letting go of a dollar or two at the mall arcade, but most of the time the rule was “We can look, but we’re not getting anything.”

More often than not, that was perfectly fine for us.

It wasn’t about going out and buying a carload of new items that we didn’t need. It was simply a way to go and be together outside of the house and have a good time without spending a lot of money.

As kids, it was always just fun to take in the experience of being out in the world, and I’m sure it was probably beneficial to our parents to let us expel some of the energy we had built up during the day.

Nowadays, going to the store seems to be relegated to the list of chores that we have for the day. The objective is to get in and out as quickly as possible and not look in sections that we don’t need to be in. Then we roll our eyes and sigh if it takes a split second longer than it should have.

Stores aren’t nearly as inviting as they used to be either. Back in the day, you’d walk around a big box store, and they’d have game displays in the electronics section that you and other kids you’ve never met before could take turns playing.

The pet sections would have live fish in tanks that you could stand and watch swim around. Even the grocery section would have a lobster tank you could watch.

There’s this widely adopted assumption that you have to spend a lot of money to be able to go and do things with your family. That may be truer today than it was in my youth, but I still don’t think that it’s totally a fact.

All of the places we would go on our “just looking” outings were also places that we would buy things that we needed or wanted at other times. We would just set aside a night to go to those same places and just be there for a while to hang out and enjoy each other’s company without spending money.

Those were some of my favorite nights as a kid growing up, and I think we could all use some of those nights here and there.

Just going out with the family with no pressure to unfold the wallet or crack open the purse. Just getting in a good walk without worrying about poor weather. Just experiencing the world for what it is.

Just looking.