Twenty-first century shopping

I was in quest of an appropriate gift for the daughter of Friend Who Sings and Gardens.  Having finished medical school, the daughter is off to my birthplace of Edmonton to do her internship.  This meant finding something that might help her through the winter, yet not take up space in her suitcase.

I decided on a Mountain Equipment Co-op gift card, since she might find something warm, or, barring that, something to ward off the summer mosquitoes.

The membership number on our MEC card had worn off twice over the course of seventeen Hadean winters, where Mountain Equipment Co-op is practically a matter of survival, either first or second-hand.  I was perfectly prepared to take out a new membership - even though you don't need one to purchase a gift card - but the cheerful young man at the till was game for some detective work.

I seemed to remember it was under the Resident Fan Boy's name, and the till-man found his name -- on the wrong street in Hades.  (The RFB has a rather popular name.)  After assuring him we'd lived nowhere else but in Hades and Victoria - at least since becoming MEC members, we tried my name.  No luck.  Did I remember my Ottawa phone number? 

Oh gawd.

I could remember the last four digits, then deliberately tried not actually thinking about it, to see if the full sequence came unbidden from the outer edges of my brain.

It did.  And there it was, on his database.  The RFB, for reasons known only to himself, had added some initials -- possibly due to that other guy in Hades bearing his name.

The cheerful young man scrawled the membership number across our ancient card in indelible ink, just as they had in Hades a dozen years ago.  It will probably wear off again.

Then I purchased a $25 gift card.

"She can get a nice pair of socks," he said.

Damn.

A poor roll model

Demeter is taking advantage of the fact she now has family in town. Well, that was the idea, so I agree to accompany her shopping. She thinks of this as a happy thing.

I'll let her think that.

I've never cared for shopping, accompanied or unaccompanied, so the day before the expedition, I do a dry run - a wet run, really, as it's pouring. I do a circuit of likely items and stores.

On the appointed day, I lead Demeter through, pointing out likely items. This works well.

I reach to stop the elevator at the Bay Centre as a woman with a stroller approaches, because that's what I liked to have done for me in my stroller days. It turns out she's going down, so she elects to wait.

"I never hold the elevator," Demeter explains. "You never know which direction they want."

"Yes," I say. "But I think, in the long run, it's better to acknowledge a person's presence. She knows that we knew she was there. That can change a whole day."

We're nearly done, but Demeter decides to make a three-block detour to buy green tea for elder daughter. Three blocks is quite a consideration at the tail-end of an ambitious shopping day - especially if you're at the tail-end of your eighties. I see Demeter tiring out, and suggest a restaurant, reaching out to prevent her from entering a crosswalk at which the signal is ticking down; she'll never make it across with her walker/rollator.

She decides to trundle past the bus stop instead. I move to the inner sidewalk to avoid a tangle of strollers, walkers, and wheelchairs by the shelter.

Demeter presses on past a blond woman standing in front of a pole. The woman looks after her furiously and exclaims, "Seriously!"

I'm bewildered, but join Demeter at the cross signal.  While we're waiting, the lady approaches us from behind and scolds:  "A simple 'excuse me' would suffice!"  As I gaze at her blankly, she declares, "She ran right over my foot!"  I think I might have felt tempted to apologize if it weren't for the self-righteous glare and the schoolmarmish tone. 

Even then, it's not my place to excuse my mother, who hasn't really heard her, anyway. As we cross, I relay what was said.

"I didn't run over her," Demeter says flatly.  "I feel lines on the pavement; I would have noticed her foot had I run over it."

I feel discombobulated and distressed, even as we settle into lunch.  I'm also a bit wary, because the woman looked familiar -- but then, everyone in Victoria does.

I wonder if what really pissed her off was not being acknowledged.

The tenth day of Christmas (slip-sliding away)

Gift certificates are a mixed blessing for someone who hates to shop. I mean, it really is looking a gift horse in the mouth, but I don't much care being sent out to shop for myself (and by extension, the Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter who aren't shoppers either) in the post-holiday crowds of shoppers.

So yesterday, we all set off for the forty-five-minute slog into downtown. Our challenge this time was steady snow and pavements slick with slush. Not quite two steps forward, one step back, but it felt like it. The gift certificates in question were the annual Chapters certificates from the girls' generous godparents. (Chapters, for non-Canadians, is probably the equivalent of Borders in the States, and I dunno, Waterstones in Britain?)

Elder daughter made a beeline for The Dark Knight, y'know, that other Christian Bale/Heath Ledger flick. Chapters seems to have done away with the family shelf in their DVD section, but we mosied over to "Musicals". Younger daughter gave a little gasp, and made the same reaching-for-then-pulling-her-hand-back gesture that she makes when trying to decide on a book or video at home.
"Do you see something you want?"
"I don't know."
"It looks like you see something interesting. Can you tell me what it is?"
"I don't know."
"Can you point at it?"
"I'm scared."
"Of the movie?"
"No."
"What are you afraid will happen?"
"You might say no."
"Well, it's your gift certificate, so you can choose whatever you want."
Another little gasp and aborted reach.
"I won't say no."
With an anticipatory smile, she pulls down South Pacific. Oh, damn, damn, damn. It's still under the tree, set aside as her Twelfth Day of Christmas present. I try to explain. She stomps off across the shop. I call after her. She says: "NO!" I can't blame her; it's my poor planning, and she's done that most difficult thing of making a choice, and I've said "no", just as she feared. We manage to talk her into getting The King and I
and I leave the Resident Fan Boy and elder daughter to do the certificate negotiation, and hastily get younger daughter to a nearby TexMex restaurant to restore us both.

After a hearty lunch, the RFB and elder daughter set off for the drug store, and younger daughter and I begin the 45-minute trudge-trudge-slip home. We cut up York Street past some funky little shops and pause to admire a Christmas bird sanctuary that one of them has set up: Then we make our way through the beat-up streets of Lowertown, stepping aside to let the sidewalk snow-movers (which look like orange earwigs) mow past us. I note that they are not laying down gravel, so we still slide further east, past the ice rink at the Catholic school where boys of different hues play pick-up hockey, some managing to skate through the snow covering the ice, some making do in their boots.

At home, I surreptitiously sneak South Pacific from the Twelfth Day of Christmas gift bag into the Tenth Day of Christmas gift bag.

That night, I invite younger daughter to watch Oliver! which was in the Eighth Day of Christmas gift bag. We get to the intermission before it's time for her bath and she comes to kiss me good night:
"Oliver is so strange!"
"Don't you like it?"
"Yes, but it's better than Elmwood School!" (We saw a cut-down production of the musical at the swish private school for girls a few weeks ago.)
"There's a lot of dancing, isn't there? And I think you like the costumes?"
"Yes, and Oliver was only a little girl!" she says, shaking her head in wonder, remembering the all-girl production.
"Well, in the movie, they could have a boy for Oliver, couldn't they?"

This morning, the Resident Fan Boy offers to take her tobogganing, and she enthusiastically accepts ("That's a great idea!") and delightedly plans to watch South Pacific afterwards: "I missed South Pacific so much!"

For myself, I'm accompanying elder daughter to her hated clarinet lesson downtown, and am planning to finally read younger daughter's assessment report which I'd set aside over Christmas. I need to ration out my heartbreaks like Christmas gifts.

Dreams and nightmares

Freezing rain ("freezing bane" is more like it) fell early this morning. The Resident Fan Boy had been worshipping at the altar of Environment Canada throughout Sunday, so I really hadn't bothered to fix younger daughter's school lunch. When word came that the school buses had been cancelled, we knew there was little point tackling the treacherous sidewalks for slightly-less-than-one kilometre uphill to school. I phone the school's absence line and tuned the television to Sesame Street. (Elder daughter and the RFB must brave the elements for the sake of marks and money.)

While I've given up going outside in freezing rain (don't; not if you can help it), I have been making an attempt to do other things I've been nervous about. One of these is taking younger daughter to an evening ballet performance. Elder daughter, despite my best brain-washing attempts, has sworn off ballet, and Ottawa only offers matinées of The Nutcracker. Since younger daughter had made it quite happily through an evening performance of a musical review put on by a local theatre company over the Christmas holidays, I thought I'd finally make a stab at it when Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo showed up in town with their production of Le Songe. Ah, A Midsummer Night's Dream, I thought: slapstick, fairies, Mendelssohn.... perfect for younger daughter.

Well, it wasn't a total disaster. This was very, very French, that is, heavy on whimsy, preciousness, and what the Resident Fan Boy called "A-a-a-a-a-rt!" (as in Gonzo the Great playing Mozart in a vat of oatmeal with bagpipes). Younger daughter, whom we'd carefully prepared, sat between us with Ballerina, the stuffed chocolate-coloured lab and Jeffrey her dog-puppet. She enjoyed training her opera glasses on the members of the audience waiting for the curtain. I was seated next to Mr. Elbows, and the RFB was seated next to Monsieur Appreciator of French Art who was a dead ringer for Mick Fleetwood (down to his build and wardrobe) and chuckled appreciatively throughout the performance. The ballet was a mixture of sort of Commedia dell'Arte (the band of mechanicals), traditional ballet (the lovers, conveniently labelled in large letters), and modern ballet (scary fairies). Of the last, these were probably rather Shakespearean fairies: not fluffy and ethereal, but earthy and erotic, all "holes and poles". Titania's white body stocking was decorated with aqueous circles emphasizing her breasts, belly and pudenda, while Oberon sported a sort of pearl saddle horn on his belt (and yeeowtch! what a physical hazard for his dancing partners!). All of this innuendo would go flying over younger daughter's head, and truth to tell, the choreography of the fairy section was by far the most interesting of the ballet, which spent rather too much time on the story of the four lovers (which, let's face it, is usually the most tedious part of the play). Three quarters of the way through the first act, younger daughter was asleep.  The Resident Fan Boy and I exchanged glances as the lights came up for intermission and gathered up our coats. While waiting for a taxi in the lobby, we saw a family with a four-year-old boy making an exit and, so help me, we heard a baby crying in the orchestra section at the beginning of the ballet...

I don't know if the evening would have been better if I hadn't been battling a persistant headache resulting from a 3+ hour shopping expedition to seek out a "dressy" outfit for elder daughter's European class trip next week. First off, I am not, in any sense of the term, a fashion consultant (that would be eldest daughter's best friend who was sick this weekend). Secondly, my limit for shopping malls is just under 90 minutes. Thirdly, elder daughter had no idea what she wanted, being a jeans-and-tee girl herself. So it was my worst nightmare: 90 minutes in boutiques and waiting outside and inside fitting rooms, followed by 90 minutes of bloody Payless Shoes where I've never been and I never wish to revisit. Then she said she needed a bag. What did I think? I carry everything in cloth book bags, I told her, slumping off to sit on a shoe-fitting bench while she quizzed the salesgirl....

Next attempt: Broadway Across Canada season tickets. I'm praying there are matinées. And no dress code.