We’re upgrading our Verizon DSL to the business version, and either Verizon has been much more efficient than they said they’d be, or the 9 to 15 day gap in service hasn’t started yet. I’m rooting for the former.
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Over the holidays we drove down to LA. We considered cancelling the trip after my father died, but we’d already talked to Sophia about it (and you cancel a 3-year-old’s visit to her friends at your own peril), and there wasn’t much of anything for us to do in Northern California before the funeral, so we decided to go ahead with the trip.
The wonderful: New Year’s at Tamar’s (I hope it does become a tradition!), seeing Tamar and Dan and Damian and Michele and Allison and Adam and Atticus and a whole host of other friends in the few short days we had, visiting old LA haunts (Sweet Lady Jane! Michel Richard!), and getting away from the general malaise of my father’s passing.
The not-so-great: realizing that the worldview of some of my friends down there is so alien, antithetical, and abhorrent to my beliefs that I probably won’t contact them again, remembering that even non-freeway driving in LA is horrible and every road is four to six lanes wide and packed with people trying to beat the next light, and finding a decent midtown hotel for a family. We stayed at the Doubletree in Westwood, which was functional, but I need to find a suites hotel for the next time.
I know there will be a next time, because as we left LA on Sunday morning Darin said, “I have to wait a whole year to get another raspberry tart at Michel Richard.” I said, “We could come back sooner than that.” Darin shook his head and said, “No, no, we really can’t.” So I’m willing to surmise that he doesn’t secretly wish we still lived down there, but he’s willing to do the drive down every so often, particularly if, as we’ve discussed, we get the DVD system installed in the car for the kids.
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Darin has needed some new clothes for a while. I couldn’t find enough clothes to pack for this trip. We had heard that LA might have a few clothes shops.
So what the hey: let’s do some clothes shopping while we’re down there.
We had planned to go clothes shopping on the 31st, but we didn’t make it, which is why I was doing laundry at Tamar’s on the 1st. On the 2nd we headed out to the Beverly Center, which is Shopping Mecca. Every upscale chain store you’ve ever heard of and then some.
I remembered that I had some clothes shopping to do as well, so I headed into Macy’s women’s department. All of the dresses I saw were slinky, had spaghetti straps, and enough glitter on them to make me itch. I went up to the clerk and said, “I need a black dress appropriate for a funeral.”
“Oh,” she said. “So you’ll need sleeves?”
Why, yes. Yes, I would.
She showed me the one dress she had that fit my requirements. I don’t even remember what the dress looked like, but I do know that the sizes available were: 0, 2, 4, and 6.
I returned to Darin and said, “We have to go to Glendale anyhow. I’m going to Nordstrom.”
At Nordstrom I walked into the women’s dress department and repeated my request. The clerk there looked at me with sympathy and said, “My mother-in-law just passed away. I’m sorry for your loss. Please, wait here in this dressing room and I’ll get you some outfits to try on. Would you like some espresso?”
Night, meet Day.
I’ve always heard that Nordstrom clerks are more helpful because they get commissions. But my friend Allison, who worked at Macy’s a million years ago, said that clerks in the dress department got commissions there. So what’s the reason for the disparity in behavior?
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In some ways LA felt intensely familiar—several times I had the deja vu-ish feeling that I’d just been driving down such-and-such a street. But in many ways it already feels like we lived there a million years ago. I couldn’t remember the order of streets in particular areas, an order I could have rattled off no problem six months ago.
LA. Just another tourist destination for us now.
So I’m willing to surmise that he doesn’t secretly wish we still lived down there, but he’s willing to do the drive down every so often, particularly if, as we’ve discussed, we get the DVD system installed in the car for the ids.When I was a wee lad, back in the 1980s, we’d pass the time on long car journeys with Ast駻ix stories on cassette. I suppose that mere audio entertainment won’t wash with today’s kids…
Nordstrom’s customer service was excellent probably because of their employee handbook. My boss gave me a copy of it one day and it’s remained posted in my office ever since.
“Rule #1: Use your good judgment in all situations.”
Hope you are doing well.
I read this and had to smile:
In some ways LA felt intensely familiar耀everal times I had the deja vu-ish feeling that I’d just been driving down such-and-such a street. But in many ways it already feels like we lived there a million years ago.
Because I’ve got it in reverse: I moved to L.A.from the Bay Area and driving up last weekend to drop off my husband for Macworld was weirdly dislocating.