Into Comfortable and Tight

Every year I head to the Galleria Mall, in Poughkeepsie and get some summer clothes shopping done.  I could shop for clothes in Beijing, where I live the rest of ye year.  But there are a number of reasons I don’t do that.  I never find my shoe size and I’m only a ten and a half.   I rarely find my waist size.  Thirty eight is bigger than it ought to be but its not that big.  Prices for clothes anywhere else in the world tends to be enormously more expensive than it is in the U.S. where wages never seem to rise for most people but neither does inflation. 

I went in to the Banana Republic on the second floor with my big book of Egyptian History in hand.  And, as I’ve done for the last three or four years I grabbed up a bunch of dress shirts and short sleeve shirts and tee shirts.  I didn’t try any one last year, thinking that the XL would suffice.  It hadn’t.  And I segregated out the shirts into comfortable and tight and proceeded over to the check out. 

Last year a kindly young woman, who’s parents were from Shanghai had helped talk me into getting a banana Republic credit card which I later had mysterious charges on and cancelled.  Not this year.  My sister had given me four one hundred dollar bills to pay me back for the kilin carpet I’d bought for her in Tbilisi.  Yes. They took cash.  But no, they didn’t not have any pants that were my waist and my length.  Well.   A nice older lady, a peer that is to say, reminded me that I could order these pants (rather than go over to Macy’s as I’d have otherwise done, to get  a pair of Dockers) on line.  This seemed smart.

This year, there was a new, proper, café in the mall.  “Get me a vanilla latte” my daughter wrote to me in Wechat.  I got everyone coffee.  And bolted through Target where I got a new piece of luggage.  Out at the car I realized I’d left my Egyptian History book back in the unfortunately named Banana Republic.  It was still there on the shelf, by the on-sales dress shirts where I’d left it.

Saturday 7/28/18