When the kids were very little and most of the Christmas shopping was for toys, I asked Mark to take a day off work to help me. I was overwhelmed with three kids with three different interests. To be clear, Mark RARELY takes time off work. A few days between Christmas and New Year’s and the rare vacation, but long ago he agreed to this shopping day and so it has been a standing date with us ever since.
In recent years we have capped it off with Happy Hour down on the Plaza before we head home.
This year we weren’t able to do that and so we started with breakfast before we headed to the mall. Eek! The mall. We are not mall people, but we also are not Eskimos so we opted for indoor shopping.
A long time ago, a customer told me about a strategy to remember things based on a plan by St. Thomas Moore. You envision the rooms of your home, and as you try to recall something you walk through the rooms to retrieve the information. It sounded complicated to me and I never did it, but at the mall I am just like that saint. I know where to park based on the time of day and day of the week, I know the layout, I know every place I want to go on the first floor, up to the second, loop around and out.
The plan being to retrieve what I came for and spend as little time there as possible.
With my husband and shopping assistant along, my saintly plan got side-tracked. He’s a slow mall walker. He doesn’t got out much ever so he has to look at everything. That’s how we spent 45 minutes at the Microsoft store talking to a guy about a computer we have no intention of buying.
Prior to the mall, we went to Target and he kept disappearing so I started yelling, “Marco” and from the coffee aisle I heard a faint “Polo.” There was my lil wanderer with boxes of Keurig coffee to add to the cart.
When we set foot in Sephora, he took it all in for fifteen seconds and said, “I can’t do this.” The saleswoman tried to sweet talk him into staying, but I knew that place would max out his estrogen limit. “Okay,” I said, “but please don’t wander off. I won’t be in here long.”
And off he wandered and I felt like I was a shepherd watching over an ADD lamb all day long.
Where is he now? Socks? Why is he buying socks? Slippers? With memory foam? Not on the list. No, no we’re shopping for other people today not ourselves. (That’s later. Online where the evidence is not so easy to uncover.) One day, dude. That’s what we have here. One day to knock most of this out.
We made a tiny dent in our shopping and there was much more to do, but I had to get a cut and color and even the soon-to-be birth of the Lord doesn’t get in the way of that. He dropped me off and came back later to get me.
I was still in the beautification process and so he hung around waiting for me to finish. Amy told us a story she’d heard about a guy who surprised his wife in the bedroom with leather underwear that zippered in front and Mark said, “What if the zipper got caught in something?”
“Like what,” Amy asked.
We laughed for too long and that might be one of the many reasons why I won’t be seeing him during the week for another year.