Christmas Shopping

Went over to Arden Fair Mall this evening. Christmas season wouldn't be complete without at least one mall visit. People looked just fabulous. I don't know whether it was because they were young and well-dressed, eagerly listening to their cell phones, or whether, with my old eyewear (3 years old+, and aging by the day), everybody looks just fabulously fuzzy these days, and maybe it's just a fad for everyone to hold the side of their head.

I was having serious deja vu moments too. I constantly felt like I KNEW these people, or had seen them all before. Perhaps I had: last Christmas at Arden Fair Mall, and the Christmas before that. As I get older and forget everybody's name, in compensation, everyone seems to be becoming SO familiar. In a couple of decades, I'll be a familiar face at the Arden Fair Mall Food Court, rocking back and forth on my chair, calling everyone Bob and Kathy, smiling and babbling (and blogging, of course).

There was a department store security camera pointed directly at the door of a women's changing room, in just the right place to catch the bald spot on my head. I never get to see that view in normal life, so I started pacing back and forth directly in front of the door, trying to size up that spot. Pretty soon women, with odd furtive smiles, began queueing up. They too seemed surprised by the size of the bald spot.

There was a good T-Shirt slogan at Hot Topic (all the wrong sizes for me, unfortunately): "It's Fun Until Someone Loses an Eye. Then Hey! Free Eyeball!"

California mall shoppers are so multi-colored and multi-racial. It isn't like when I lived in Salt Lake City, greeting Bob and Kathy at the downtown ZCMI Mall. In Utah, there seemed to be about eight different general types of alarmingly-white facial types, all seemingly descendant from the same set of Mormon pioneers (with an odd African-American, here and there, to jar one's sensibility). Not Sacramento!

This year, I was surprised by all the Russian-speaking teenagers. I guess they are the same Russian kids I used to see about a decade ago at Arden Fair Mall. Surprisingly, their names were all Bob and Kathy too.

I caught some snippets of conversation:

• the odd cell phone utterance ("I know you know that");
• shopping plans - or maybe dating plans ("we want the cute one that doesn't look all cheap");
• trying to eat with the herd ("maybe something at that Mexican place - it's popular!");
• the realistic 12-year-old girl in Sear's ("we're too poor for this store"); and,
• the philosophical question I'm sure to answer in my Arden Fair Food Court dotage, decades from now ("are you at least happy?")