For Mom and Bloomingdale's

Well, it’s been a while. Some things have happened. But I’ll try to be back with a little more regularity.

On any given Sunday when I have nothing to do, I go to Bloomingdale’s. It’s a rare occasion that I actually need something, and I’m far more inclined to window shop my way through all of the department store’s floors wondering what it might be like to own silk nightgowns or studded stilettos or hot pink leather gloves. I try on evening gowns and luxurious coats for no reason, I wrap myself in cashmere ponchos, I sniff my way through all of their candle offerings. While a department store could easily be written off as a pastime of the frivolously wealthy, for me it always gave me a sense of communing with my mother. The store was a place where we could just look around and feel fabulous, even if we didn’t buy anything–and many times we didn’t. In fact, I’d often get dressed up to go. Bloomingdale’s was our holy ground, our seasonal pilgrimage, our site of endless hours of bonding. My aunt once said to me that the store in some ways was in my blood, that before I emerged into the world “you were inside your mother and we were in Bloomingdale’s.”

Sometimes I go when they’re having a sale, but often I just go to be with her. Usually upon entering the store I say hello to her, just sort of quietly out loud, into the ether. I know that she hears me from wherever in Spain she is vacationing, as I like to say. My mother used to joke that she’d be happy to move anywhere as long as it was within driving distance of a Bloomingdale’s. I don’t know exactly why she loved it so much–she never carried the same love in her heart for a Macy’s or a Nordstrom or a Saks Fifth Avenue, though bless her heart she had credit cards for all of them. But I wonder if she loved it for the same reason I continue to: that in its walls, no matter where you are, there’s some kind of attainable glamour. If you wait long enough or cross your fingers, a sale will emerge and deposit cashmere into your hot little hands for less than $100; or a dress that retails for three digits will find its way into your Big Brown Bag for a mere $13; or a designer sweater covered in lips, perhaps too kooky and warm for anyone else in South Florida, will keep you toasty back in New York. These things don’t happen all the time, certainly, but when they do it’s like having a beautiful little moment of luxury. But you could also leave Bloomingdale’s with just some makeup in a Little Brown Bag and feel like a zillion dollars.

When I walk around the store now, I see my mother in my face when I try on sunglasses or hold up earrings or try out a new eyeliner. She is on my wrist lecturing me about how perfume should smell, she is on the racks urging me to buy that sweater dress, she is in my ear telling me not to skip the swimsuits, she is at the makeup counter asking me if I really need another red lipstick. I remember when she’d go in to refresh her stock of Coco perfume, her way-too-many Lancome mascaras, her Chanel lipgloss, her Clinique blush–it was at the latter that she’d always get just enough cosmetics to receive their free gift with purchase. A sales associate at the Clinique counter in Boca Raton became a friend, and we bring our purchases–from all across the store–to her still.

Maybe it’s strange that a department store like this is such a defining facet of my existence, that I love it the way some people love a particular beach or a museum or a park. I don’t know that it makes much sense myself, but as a person in constant adoration of glamour and nostalgia, maybe it does. Walking around the store is an education in fashion, style, design, and economics. I often leave at least enlightened. Going was always something special, and I always feel at least a little special when I go now. This feeling is often something I want other people to feel, to understand, and when I take them to Bloomingdale’s it feels like I am sharing part of myself, my aspirations, my visual memory and aesthetics with them. I want them to know they deserve something special, too.

More than one friend once described me taking them to the store as a rite of passage, an invitation into an inner life I famously don’t share with a lot of people. I am an unofficial tour guide: I know what’s on each floor and where to look for the best-priced sale items, I can make suggestions about my favorite ways to order their frozen yogurt at Forty Carrots (plain with honey, usually, and it’s better to share), which entrance I prefer (in midtown New York, on 60th and 3rd).

I think more than anything I just always wanted to feel absolutely fabulous, and for a few hours that’s always something I can have at Bloomingdale’s before I exit out onto Third Avenue and go about the rest of my life: groceries, work, phone calls, etcetera. But like my mother, there’s always a piece of Bloomingdale’s with me, too.