(*This is maybe a slight exaggeration, but seriously only slight.)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about being a nearly life-long glasses-wearer. In it I happened to mention the ginormous glasses I had during my middle school years that I loathed, and which I held my mom partly responsible for. So, I felt like I needed to set the record straight. Mom may have taken the advice of the guy working at the glasses store over the preferences of her daughter that one time, but most of the time my mom supported my own aesthetic choices even when they were a bit (okay, that’s a huge understatement) challenging.

Not long ago Ron and I were talking, and he mentioned how much the internet has changed our shopping habits. He talked about how in the pre-internet days when we were in need of some sort of item, we just went to our local store and whatever they had in stock that’s what we would get, but the internet and its wealth of choices made us more particular. That’s when I was reminded of a pair of shoes, and I said, well, that might have been his experience, but long before the internet I was a pretty choosy shopper.

It was late spring or early summer. I don’t remember the exact year but I was roughly middle school aged so let’s say around 1989. I had my heart set on a particular pair of sandals. They were of a huarache style and they were a mauve pink color. They looked something like this:

I was able to find these shoes and this image in mere seconds thanks to the miracle of the internet, but we didn’t have the internet in 1989. We had the Spiegel catalog and we had local stores. I should also note that while I was able to find these shoes in seconds thanks to the internet, they are not being sold by a retailer that I have ever heard of. You can find them here at this link if you are interested. I would suggest you hurry because this post of mine is sure to set off a mauve huarache buying spree. (Kidding, of course.)

Now, without the internet you might wonder how I had even decided that these were the shoes I had to have. Did I see someone wearing them in a TV show? Did I see them in a magazine? Did I simply dream them up in my head? I don’t remember, but I know myself pretty well and I know how I shop to this day, and so my money’s on door number three. So, back in 1989 I decided I wanted a pair of shoes that may or may not have existed and then enlisted my mom to help me track them down.

Those of you who are not familiar with the Garden State might not realize that we take our malls very seriously. In the 1980s malls were where it was at, and determined to find the shoes that existed solely as a vision in my head I enlisted my mom to take me shopping, and shop we did. This shoe-finding mission did not all take place in a single day, but to my patient mother it probably felt like it did. We went to Rockaway and Ledgewood Malls. We went to Willowbrook and possibly even the Mall at Short Hills. We went to Paramus Park, Garden State Plaza and Riverside Square. We even went to non-mall stores. Who remembers Sealfon’s in Ridgewood? Do you miss it as much as I do? 

We found plenty of huarache sandals. We even found a few mauve sandals, but we did not find mauve huaraches. A reasonable person would have admitted defeat and settled for one of these substitutes, especially knowing the shoes she wanted might not even exist, but I am not a quitter. 

My persistence paid off. One day at a random shoe store in the Bergen Mall (yes, Jersey friends, the Bergen Mall, of all places) I finally found my mauve sandals much to my mother’s relief.

Anyway, I think about those sandals a lot, every time I get it in my head that I want a particular thing (It’s not always footwear, but sometimes, okay, many times, it is.) and I attempt to locate this thing in my head in the real world. Sometimes I’m successful, but many times I’m not. Except I have to admit, that unlike my mom I don’t resort to traversing the whole of North Jersey in my quest. So, really is it any surprise that I come up empty handed? I guess I have become more of a quitter in my old age. So thanks, Mom, for putting up with this picky and particular shopper.

— Alissa

P.S. You probably noticed that this post and email (if you’re a subscriber) looked a little bit different. I have migrated Creativity and Contentment over to it’s very own WordPress website CreativityandContentment.com and am using WordPress’s newsletter tool to send out this message. So fingers crossed that you received this email and found this post, but just in case I will be sending out a second email a little bit later to double check that you received this original message. Sorry for the double emails, but I just wanted to make sure everything was working properly. Please feel to reach out to me if you experienced any issues receiving the email or the new format or anything else you noticed!

Weekly Inspiration

What I’m Reading: Yeonnam-Dong’s Smiley Laundromat by Kim Jiyun (Translated by Shanna Tan)

What I’m Watching: The Electric State

What I’m Listening to: “Last Dance with Mary Jane” by Tom Petty