Today a man walked up to me at an event in the neighborhood community garden where people were wearing first-name name tags and said, "Carmen. Did you used to work at Levinsky's?"
My jaw dropped. I did, in the late 1980s. I worked at the flagship location of the family-owned clothing store, in downtown Portland, Maine, in the shoe department. I started there when I was 15, at $3.50 an hour, and I stayed on through high school, weekends and summers, until I left Maine for college.