Shiny Sparkly Things...

Family picture in Dominguez Canyon circa 1989, dressed in our desert finest.

Sometimes I like to walk down Fifth Avenue in the evenings, in moments of Holly Golightly-inspired nostalgia, and look at the window displays in all the magnificent shops lining the streets. Sometimes this can be very difficult to do without becoming involved in an incident of physical danger brought on by directionally challenged tourists and bad camera angles that just happen to always intersect with your rib cage or chin at the wrong moment. More than once, I've had my brushes with near doom at the hands of cute Asian families or high school students exiting tour buses and flashing their cell phone cameras at everything. Even with all of the perils involved, when I am too antsy to go home for the night, but too poor to do anything that costs money (which is nearly always), I take my chances on the hazard-filled sidewalks and admire things, through the glass, that I could never, in a million years, justify owning myself.

I like to walk up from St. Patrick's Cathedral, all the way to Central Park South (avoiding the horse excrement) and then head toward Columbus Circle, looking at shiny sparkly things and the shiny sparkly people who actually buy them. Part of the fun is judging these people, and telling myself that it's much better to be poor and simple, staying grounded in reality, than it is to have everything in the world be actually attainable. It's always nice to be deluded about things like that, telling yourself ridiculous lies about how miserable these people probably are with their chauffeurs, fine dining, extravagant homes, health care, etc...  Feeling the hunger pains in my belly while walking by plates of food worth more than my whole life somehow seems like a triumph after enough of these little proletariat truisms run through my head. Money can't buy happiness, after all, or so say the people who don't have any of it...

One day, I ventured inside of Bergdorf Goodman, deciding for once to see what things looked like in these high-end stores without the glass barrier between. Aside from the mother and daughter from Jersey City who yammered on behind me, it was like entering a world where everything was bathed in some sort of heavenly glow and and joy was tangible and available to anyone with enough credit. When I made it to the top floor, home furnishings, I saw an older lady with her daughter examining several china sets and debating over which would be the most appropriate on their Christmas table this coming year. When I was a kid, we had a special set of Christmas Tupperware cups we would bring out each year for our festivities. Half were red, half were green, and they all had some sort of kitschy little white holiday design stamped on the sides in true 1970's fashion. We would fill them with store-bought "Holiday Nog" that my mother lovingly diluted with skim milk. The only debates that arose were generally less about the fine dinnerware, and more about who got to drink the olive juice left over in the can. I wondered if these ladies in Bergdorf's ever argued about who got to drink the last of the olive juice.

As I continued further through the home furnishings, I saw a married couple admiring a very lovely kitchen table and discussing the pros and cons relating to how the table would effect their living space. To me, the table looked very nice and quite sturdy, and then I thought of the table in our kitchen that my father used to support the engine of a broken-down Volkswagen microbus one bitter winter. It was extremely cold that year, and I remember there being a lot of snow that never seemed to stop falling. Somehow, my mother gave in and allowed the rebuilding of the engine to take place over several days in her kitchen, where she just sighed and looked the other direction, ignoring the thick black grease that ended up covering every surface within 5 feet of the pile of mechanical parts. I wonder if the husband in front of me was taking scenarios like that into consideration whilst admiring the craftsmanship of this fine dining table before us.

After I'd seen enough pewter and mother of pearl to last me for a good long while, I headed back down the series of escalators to leave the store. On my way down, I was accompanied on the moving staircases for 5 floors by two teenage girls discussing their upcoming summer vacations and what they'd have to buy in preparation. They went through a list of all the essentials like shoes, jewelry, more "seasonal" designer handbags, cocktail dresses, etc... The only summer vacations my family ever seemed to go on were backpacking trips in the desert. I remember to get us excited about it, my mother would surprise us with things like new flannel shirts, neon-colored flashlights or wool hiking socks. I think it was the flashlights that worked the best, especially my "hot green" flashlight that fit perfectly into my awesome "hot green" fanny pack. I imagined what these girls would do on a backpacking trip and how they'd look roaming about the desert in their cocktail dresses and new Jimmy Choos.

After a little chuckle under my breath, I finally made it to the ground floor. I said goodbye to the crystalline counters filled with beautiful little objects that shone brilliantly like mountains of diamonds under a sunset of heavenly-crafted lights. Although it's good fun to take a peek at this strange alternate reality every now and then, I am always quite happy to exit back into a world where things don't sparkle and shine quite so much.