Everyone knows the old joke about New Jersey--"What exit?" I grew up just off Exit 4 of the Turnpike, and the entire premise of the gag is ridiculous. People in New Jersey don't calculate the geographic and social differences among them by highway off ramps. We use malls.

Growing up in Jersey, you were marked by your mall in roughly the same way a man was marked by his accent in Victorian England. The Deptford Mall was for blue-collar Catholics in Gloucester County. Bridgewater Commons was for the rich north-central Jersey kids whose parents commuted to Manhattan. The Hamilton Mall was for the townies on the southern shore coast, who were part of Philadelphia's sphere of influence. A little further north at the Monmouth Mall people saw themselves as exurban New Yorkers.

I can track my own family's social progress through the malls. When I was a child, we frequented the Deptford Mall. But as the family did better, we graduated up; by the time I hit adolescence I was an Echelon Mall man. Echelon was white-collar middle class, but not quite as upscale as the nearby Cherry Hill. Like most of my contemporaries, I spent about 15 hours a week at the mall. I'd get dropped off at lunch time on the weekends and would kick around the mall with friends until dinner. On a typical Saturday, we'd order a cookie cake from the Great American Cookie Company in the food court, see a movie, hang around the arcade, buy a couple

Some of you cosmopolitans are probably horrified, but the mall is a New Jersey child's birthright, like horses for kids in Wyoming and cornfields in Iowa. Sure, the first enclosed mall in America was technically in Minnesota--the Southdale Center in Edina opened in 1956. But New Jersey has led the way since. The Bergen Mall in North Jersey opened less than a year later. Both Southdale and Bergen were climate-controlled spaces, but they were also tiny. The first large-scale, modern mall was opened in Cherry Hill in 1961. Today there are more than 50 malls in the state, each the home of a distinct tribe.

So the mall is in our blood. Twenty years later, I seek out malls wherever I go; I've been to malls in Iceland, Ireland, and Idaho. On my honeymoon in Kauai, the second thing my wife and I did was visit the island's lone mall. She's from New Jersey, too, a Rockaway Mall girl, if you know what I mean. At the Republican convention last fall I went to Minneapolis's colossal Mall of America every day, taking in its splendor. When it was built in 1992, the MOA--locals call it the Mall of Gomorrah--was the biggest in the country. It's soon to be eclipsed by the Meadowlands Xanadu in Secaucus, New Jersey, with its 4.5 million square feet of space. In addition to shopping, the Xanadu will have a Ferris Wheel, an 18-screen movie theater, a bowling alley, a baseball stadium, and an indoor ski slope. I'll be there when it opens.