We Will Go A-Shopping

The Mission Beach Roller Coaster, 36x24, Pen and Ink, 1983.

Himself: He liked that idea. Herself: Why don’t we go eat cheap Chinese and go to Crate And Barrel? The Holiday: Wall to wall crowds at Fashion Valley. No Parking. Balance: Everybody had shopping bags, so we bought a few small things and had bags to carry too.

There we were, smiles on our faces, sneaking into the mall the back way, discovering no matter how we snuck in there was no parking.

We didn’t care. We did the old SDSU Wait routine…that’s picking a spot and camping out. Pretty soon someone comes along and wants to go home right in front of you. And they did.

We ate……no Chinese as the mall is forcing out the mom and pop, low end places to bring in only high end chains. G didn’t like the new Chinese place. We ate Ga-rrrrrreek. We liked the Greek too, but only after eating did we remember we were eating Greek tonight with the P2’s too. There were lines out the door everywhere. There were eaters fighting for seats underneath the heaters. I should have brought a camera to prove the shoppers were out in force on Boxing Day, and eaters were doubly out in force.

We shopped…….or we window shopped. He wandered here……I wiped the allergies away from my nose and waited outside. He shopped there…….and I wiped the allergies off my face…….I window shopped here……ditto wipe. You get the drill. We laughed a lot.

No high end stores for us the first swing. I stopped in to Crate and Barrel to grab a few felted Christmas Ornaments, and we stopped, very briefly because of the nose factor at some “woman’s lifestyle store” to grab a paper mache rabbit. Everyone should have one of those. G stopped in at Nordies to look for Josef Siebel shoes. We found them at the walking store. Watching G rebound from the price tag was amusing.

We laughed a lot. We checked all the stores for warm coats I could wear to Alaska, but the only ones I liked were in the two to three hundred dollar range. Forget that. Still laughing, at JCPenney’s G finally talked me into purchasing that very expensive, red felt purse I kept visiting that was now marked down to twenty bucks. Everyone really needs a very ugly red felt purse too.

English was a second language. That was ok. Shopping was the third language, and we all spoke that. But not everybody smiled. We did until we stopped in to See’s very aware that we were going back to WW full force at the first of the year, and there we found that See’s too had been forced out of the mall. To us it doesn’t make a lot of sense to continue following your high end mall business plan during this time of depression.

We came home with our 70% off Christmas ornaments shopped out for the season. Then again, there was that earthy colored sweater set………