SteinMart

I am all a-tingle, boys and girls, because on Saturday I am jetting off to South Carolina, where they have -- yes, that's right, Becky's FAVORITE store--SteinMart. I thought I was going to be able to go while I was in Arkansas recently and indeed I drove by it about five or six times but never was able to go inside.

The history of my love for SteinMart is a few years old. [OH CHRIST, DO WE HAVE TO READ THIS?] There is one right near my parents' house in Little Rock. My mother and I would always go whenever I visited, but a)I had to help my mother walk around with the cart and she would get tired out and I wasn't really able to shop and/or b)my father would read the paper in the car and then get bored and come in to get us and that would be that. Wherever my father would take us to shop, the meter was always running. He would sit in one of those folding chairs near the cash registers for a while and we knew we had that much time to get with it. We moved fast, or as fast as we could with a cart and a cane. Then he'd get bored and come find us. "Why don't you buy it?" he'd ask my mother. "Go ahead," he would urge. He didn't care what the heck the thing looked like, he just wanted to get out of the place. The meter was up.

Now and then they would urge me to go to SteinMart on my own, with their car while they stayed home. Now and then I would. But I could still hear the meter running in my head. That's of course when I would see the most adorable outfits, great looking blazers and white pants with pink flamingos, home fashions, pillows, divine little cocktail toothpicks. But I could only look with longing.

Pawleys Island is where I am going and my friends have a beautiful home there. They live right on a golf course and it's fun to watch grown men act like babies while we eat dinner in the back yard. Once I saw a guy wrap his club around a tree. They look cute in those little carts buzzing around too. I'm pretty sure most of them are drunk.

I can hardly believe I am actually going to be able to go to SteinMart with a girlfriend. Unless of course we don't have time, which will be perfectly fine. I'm used to it. But I'm very very hopeful.

Tres bien merci,
b