Northstroms

I feel compelled to relive some of my firsts while watching Maya go through so many of her own. One profound memory in particular won’t seem to leave me be, so I’ll air it out and put it to rest all at the same time.
At thirteen I was invited on my first trip to “the City” (without enormous chartered buses, pedantic chaperones and brown bagged lunches) with my childhood best friend and her parents for some shopping. My best friend’s father drove us. He is a physician specializing in an area which leads to lots of money, and I can’t think of a thing money attracts better than More Money. My best friend and I were quite different but suited each other very well. We wiled away many a slow afternoon at her house, which in itself was enormous and certifiably historical. I myself used no less than five bathrooms in that very house. It had dumb waiters, hidden compartments and rooms I never set foot into after half a dozen years of childhood friendship. When I close my eyes I can see the progression from the towering ceilings of the foyer all the way up to our third story sanctuary where we’d eventually smoke illicit cigarettes and drink sips of wild turkey, pretending to be adults.
Back to childhood. The driver of our car (my friend’s Dad) conveyed us in his beautifully angled and shiny Mercedes (obviously a first-I was used to riding in luxury-shotgun on the console in my parents tiny japanese truck sans seatbelt) on the way to the largest and most expensive Mall I’d set my eyes on. I remember passing a 20 plus story building beside the beltway and being informed that one of Melissa’s relatives was the architect for that towering beauty.
Shortly after passing the miraculous building I heard the telltale clink of a ring hitting the drivers side window. I looked ahead to note my friends father waving his finger at the imbecile who cut us off. My puritanical parents in all my years never, under any circumstance utilized their middle finger in singular fashion! I looked at my friend to see what to do. God knows the giggles wanted to come pouring out in voluminous tee hee heeing that only pre-teens can truly master. We looked at each other, our cheeks hurting from suppressing ourselves from the fingerly sanctioning we just witnessed, faces red with anticipation of the hurt her parents would put upon us should we react in any way other than absolute silence. The mirth was palpable in the air.
I’m certain had my best friend’s parents known that my parents laughed aloud when I asked for shopping money they’d have never consented to me coming along on the trip. I mean just exactly how much fun would it be for a poor kid to watch her best friend spend a months salary on new clothes in a few hours? But for free I learned a few new things that day that still stay with me even if I didn’t walk away equipped with clothes.
We went to a real department store. I’m not speaking of the kind that litters the aisles with post holiday clutter at half off. This department store had a man in a tuxedo playing Today’s Best Classical Hits on a Grand Piano. Steinway, no doubt. There were plates of cookies on pristine paper doilies and tea for shoppers to nosh on. And the cost of the cookies was the same as the admission price for listening to the tinkle of the paino keys, free. This was a lot to take in for a child whose entire wardrobe save for a few Christmas presents was bought exclusively at the Salvation Army or the Mission Goodwill.
My eyes popped out of my head when we got to the Juniors section. There were flashing lights, neon pink walls, and music so loud I could barely hear the shocked part of my brain bellowing that there was a giant piano in the middle of the store and it must have been dropped there by an errant tornado. Because if there were a piano in the Salvation Army thrift store it certainly weren’t presided over by a tuxedoed Man at the top of every hour, each hour, for the duration of the day.
My friend’s Mom and myself spent the afternoon trying to convince my friend to pick out the clothes we’d went to the trouble of driving for an hour and a half to posses. I’m sure she felt badly that I had no new clothing and no money with which to buy new clothing. And so she refused to look at clothes and try anything on until our verbal encouragements were louder than the piano. She overcame her clothes shopping ennui and allowed us to ply her with beautiful new clothes from the Juniors department. Her Mom probably irritated that I had no money to spend, bought me a lovely shirt dress that I wore faithfully until the tags fell off, and I appreciated it even then.
We finally left the department store with its free cookies and gratis live musical entertainment and ate at the poshest of pre-teenaged posh (if you don’t believe me, buy stock in the Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, and Housewitches of Orange County subsidiaries) California Pizza Kitchen, located conveniently in Tysons Corner Mall, just west of our Nations Capital. I may as well have rode the Concorde to Los Angeles and dined in California with movie stars.
Full of too much pizza with ideas of waving my middle finger around in public, we left the City and made our way home. I contemplated the profundity of how rich people live and how different it was from my life.
I was changed fundamentally, but outwardly I appeared just the same having experienced the City for the first time without my parents.

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1. Thank You, Lu!