Fitted Desert Fashion

One time when I was living in Edmonton, I locked myself out of my apartment on accident and I didn’t know when my husband would arrive with the keys.  I then decided to try a little social experiment which is completely reprehensible.  Let me state clearly, I should not have done this, but I was curious and so I did it.  I got down on the grass, put my hands behind my head and pretended to soak up the afternoon sun.  I also put a copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune on the grass next to me so that anyone who was passing would be able to read the title.  The experiment was asking how long it would take for a reasonably nerdy young man to hit on me using the book as a jumping off point.

It took about ten minutes.  

He talked to me, providing me with ample entertainment to pass the time, until my husband arrived with the keys.

Now, since I moved here on the island, I’ve noticed that a lot of the moms who come to the school to pick up their children wear coats and vests that are black stitched with long bubbles all down them.  They don’t wear different colors of this kind of bubble coat.  Just black.  They look very much like the still suits from the 1984 film version of Dune where the long bubbles very much resemble either the muscle groupings in the human body or a rib cage.  If you’ve ever seen the movie they give an explanation about how the suits are meant to filter sweat, urine, and poop, so that you can drink clean water while traveling in the deep desert.  

Thus, I find it incredibly interesting that anyone wears one.  I wonder if it’s a statement, or if it works well in the rain-soaked here.  They don’t look particularly effective in keeping the rain out, due to their material.  Nor do they look warm as the bubbles are way smaller and skinnier than anything down-filled in Alberta.  And yes, if someone suggested that they are black so that you can’t see your bodily fluids being processed, I’d say that that sounds like the best reason for wearing one.

Every time I see one of these island women I want to ask her about it, but I can’t… there are too many of them.  Thus, occasionally, I inquire as to where her coat came from and if there’s a story behind it.  The couple I have asked responded the exact same way.

“My mom gave it to me.”

And then my brain explodes.

Did she buy it for you on purpose?  Did she buy it for herself, come home, try it on, realize she couldn’t return it, and then bum it off on the first person she saw?  You?  Did she buy some for other people she knows?  Are your sisters wearing them?   Is that why so many women have them?

Or is there some beauty to these coats I can’t see?

Then I remember that moment on the grass and how the mere sight of a scifi novel made a man who didn’t even know me stop and talk for me for an indeterminate length of time.  Mother knows best.  She knows that what is beautiful to me, is perhaps not beautiful to a man, and every woman wants to take pride in her daughter’s beauty.  Doesn’t she?  I can’t even count how many mothers I have overheard say noisily about their daughter’s clothes (or lack thereof), “If ya got it, flaunt it.”  Perhaps what they mean to say is, “If ya got it, flaunt it… desert fashion.”


On another note:  I was reading this week about how The Mortal Engines didn’t do so well at the box office.  I can be excused from going to see it as I don’t live close to a movie theater, so I don’t see first run movies.  I read about 75% of that book years ago and I had to stop.  There is entirely too much information about processing poop in that story.  Seriously, entirely too much.  The author drew to a close the only plot arch I was interested in and then started to babble on for pages about how urine and poop are processed in the moving cities.  And I wondered if that was a particularly interesting subject to someone else as I let the book fall from my fingers.

Ghost of Dollar Stores Past

“It happened on a busy afternoon around Christmas, just like this one,” I told my friend and the cashier at the Dollarama.  One was running me through the checkout and the other one was waiting for me to be run through the checkout.  It wasn’t the ideal place for a ghost story, but I couldn’t have asked for a better setting for that particular ghost story.  I continued, “At a Dollarama just like this one.”  I paused for dramatic effect, even though I was still loading things onto the counter.  

I proceeded in slow dramatic tones, “I had a cart and I was buying some cute decorative boxes that came folded up.  There weren’t very many to choose from, but I got the last of the cute ones.  I thought I was lucky.  I continued shopping, but I turned my back on my cart for one minute, maybe not even a whole minute, and that’s when it happened.  I didn’t notice that anything was different until I went through the checkout.  All the cute boxes I had put in my cart were gone and they had been replaced with the ugly boxes I had refused to buy.  Someone had seen I had the nice ones and replaced them with the ugly ones in my cart when I wasn’t looking.”

“Did you see who did it?”

“No!  I was at Londonderry Mall in Edmonton!  Have you ever been in there around Christmas time?  Sheesh!  No.  That place was a complete zoo.  That store had so much traffic they had to move it to the other side of the mall and double its floor space.  No, I did not see who did it.  All I knew was that I had to use ugly obviously dollar store boxes for my Christmas favors that year.  It blew!”

In retrospect, I think I was making socks look like cupcakes and surrounding them with hand-made foil-wrapped chocolates.

Anyway, Christmas ghost story for ya.  You’re welcome.  And to whoever took my boxes… what nerve!