My fingers were numb by the time I wandered into a Starbucks on Bleecker Street. Even though I grew up in New York and, far more recently roamed the streets of the West Village with my son when he was a student here, I always get turned around here. Down here, the neatly numbered and easily navigable (as long as you're not driving) grid of Manhattan becomes a maze of oddly named streets that make walking a straight path virtually impossible.
Venice without the charm or the odor. Or, I suppose more accurately, Venice with a different charm and a different odor. Siri -- God love her -- somehow got me to where I wanted to go, but I could swear I ended up after a half hour walk in the bitter cold right around the corner from where I started. I am too busy thawing out to check -- or care.
I am on a mission, and time is running out. My mother's birthday is two days away, and the best I have come up with is a few rolls of quarters for the coin operated laundry machines in her apartment building. The same machines that have been there for as long as I can remember; the only thing that's different is the number of slots cut into the coin slider. You know, the doohickey that goes cha-ching. Maybe I can get her a really posh designer change purse to hold all the coins.
It is a challenge to shop for my mother. She is, in many ways, very practical and a big fan of anything that is utilitarian. Laundry is necessary, and quarters are necessary for laundry. She actually gets really excited when she is handed one or two as change. She is also, however, in many ways, a totally impractical devotee of designer labels, although she will claim until her toes fall off that her Chanel sneakers are comfortable and worth every penny. Talk about a conundrum.
Before I set off on my mission to shop for the perfect gift for the woman who has everything -- and if she doesn't have it, it is either not useful or without the proper cache -- I peered into one of her closets. It was only the tip of the iceberg, a small sample of the haute couture that had always been my mother's trademark, even when she shopped for groceries alongside stooped old ladies with folding shopping carts wheeled from home. (Mom wouldn't be caught dead with one of those; she had her groceries delivered.) Each piece had a designer label. They were all size sixes, from back in the days when a size six was actually a size six and not some arbitrary number attached to a garment just to make the buyer feel suddenly slim.
Against my better judgment, I agreed to try things on. Each outfit was more beautiful than the next. The zippers all went up eventually (after a bit of a struggle, made all the more dramatic by my mother's emphatic grunts). "That would look just perfect if you lost maybe a pound or two." A compliment in the guise of an insult, or an insult in the guise of a compliment? It's tough to say, but I am a woman after all, and no matter how you slice it, I do not quite see a compliment in there. By the time the fashion show was over, the gentle suggestion had evolved into three or four pounds, and I was fighting some vaguely familiar feelings of self-loathing. Another quarter, another pound -- what's the difference, as long as everything else stays pretty much the same.
By the time she pointed out that the clothes (though a little tight, lest I forget) at least made me look my age (thank you very much) I was, well, feeling downright cozy and at home in the apartment in Brooklyn where I grew neurotic. I mean grew up.
Time to move on. At least from the warmth of Starbucks. Fortified with coffee and a chocolate croissant, clad comfortably (and imperfectly) in zipper-less leggings, my purse weighed down with a few rolls of quarters (just in case), I am off on my annual albeit futile mission to find the perfect gift.
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