Going Native

I just took the dogs down for the last walk of the day, and had a cursory glance at myself in the mirror by the elevator in the lobby of our building. Sometimes I do this to determine if I am, indeed, suitably attired for wherever it is I am going. The answer is usually no. I keep waiting for maturity of wardrobe to be thrust upon me, but it never happens. I would be willing to meet it halfway.

But when I am walking the dogs I am not going anywhere, so if I happen to be wearing track pants, flip flops, an ancient, holey cashmere sweater from my dad's days as a Byford salesman, and my "Bush's Last Day" baseball cap, so be it: I will be seen only by the neighborhood regulars, many of whom sport odd semi-uniforms of their own. Tonight when I glanced at myself it may have been because the white necklace I am wearing caught my eye. The rest of the ensemble was pretty true to the above description.

The necklace I am wearing is made of tiny white shells, like mini whelks, whorled at one end and open at the other. They are strung together so closely they look like irregular beads; if you don't look close up it would not necessarily speak of the sea. The necklace is not mine; I bought two of them on our recent vacation: one for four-year-old Lily and one for Violet, who turned five while we were away.

Lily doesn't love jewelry. She wants to, always asks for it when she sees it on other girls, but after about ten minutes in a ring, bracelet or necklace she inevitably removes it and deposits it with me for "safekeeping." She never asks for it back. It's funny; I am not a big jewelry person myself. I prefer to be unencumbered. Except for a weakness for natural objects hanging from cords: pieces of sea glass, a mustard seed encased in a glass ball, shells. So when Lily dumped this one on me, instead of putting it away, I put it on. It made me feel like I was twenty again, the height of my "stuff on cords" days, which is a good thing. Feeling twenty, I mean. Not so much the "stuff on cords."

As I was walking around the block with the dogs, curling my cold toes in my flip flops (March in New York is not exactly flip flop weather), the necklace reminded me of the cross-country trip I took with Nicole about six years ago now, I believe. We were nowhere near a tropical sea. There were no necklaces made from tiny tropical shells, which cannot be found in the waters off the coasts of San Francisco and New York, our starting and ending destinations. But there were many, many souvenirs purchased on this drive, and the nature of the souvenirs is what I was thinking about as I fingered my necklace tonight.

For an unbelievably grounded, non-materialistic person, Nicole really likes to shop, it must be said. And in her presence I catch the fever myself, especially when given total control over the meals, which I care about much more than the shopping. As I was in possession of Jane and Michael Stern's Roadfood book and had micromanaged where we would be stopping if either of us craved so much as a beverage along the way (birch beer, brewed locally; coffee milk from a dairy just off the highway; you get the idea), I was perfectly amenable to poking around in the stores, willing to buy trinkets to remind us of the adventure.

Except that before we'd even left California, the souvenir shopping had taken a wardrobe bent, a life of its own. As we drove East, through Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma (I'll stop before my horrendous sense of US geography reveals itself further), Nicole and I began to look like less well-endowed versions of Dolly Parton, or worse--Dolly Parton as starring in some kind of American themed fashion show, Dolly being my catch-all example of wardrobe excess.

Each place we stopped, we seemed to feel an unconscious pull toward the local artisans' version of the particular city's clothing cliche. We emerged from the Southwest draped in turquoise, and I don't use the word draped lightly. Earrings, rings, belt buckles, watches: if an Albequerque artist had somehow managed to spin turquoise into yarn and knit a bulletproof vest, we would have been wearing it. We drove out of Alabama in ill-fitting second hand cowboy boots, which worked, sort of, with the enormous leather hats we'd bought in Winslow, Arizona, where I'd forced Nicole to detour in a Herculean homage to the Eagles.

By the time we hit Virginia, we looked almost too foolish to get out of the car, but of course there was a rib spot that specialized in the tomato sauce based variety, and there was no way I was passing up an opportunity to compare them to the vinegar based version we'd had for a late morning snack. Now, remembering this last legitimate foodie pit stop, I wonder if Nicole was really thinking: But what do they wear in Virginia? Are powdered wigs still in? Where can I buy one?

That's not what she said she was thinking. What she said was: I am not eating another bite of a regional specialty for the rest of the year. And I am not stopping again in forty-five minutes because you need to try a johnny cake you read about in a back issue of Gourmet. And if you get hungry again before we get home, which I find impossible to imagine, you can eat a granola bar.

Well, she didn't say that exactly. But that was the gist of it. And I might have even taken her seriously had she not been wearing chaps at the time. Okay. She wasn't really wearing chaps either. But I think she had wanted to buy some.

Anyway. I am wearing Lily's little shell necklace. It's actually quite pretty if not exactly sophisticated or grown-up. It's not "stuff on a cord." And it reminds me of where I've just been in a way that did not, as far as I could tell, cause the other late night dog walkers to express any sense of alarm. Nobody noticed my flip flops. And I do think I'm becoming more mature. I didn't even consider going out in my sarong.