I feel as if I'm gradually being drawn into the past, as if the surreal decade of the all-too-picturesque fifties is slowly coming to abduct my soul. But the feeling is pleasant, if unusual.
Today I applied for a job as a reader at a press clipping bureau. As I opened the shiny glass door to enter the too-hot front office, I felt uncomfortably like Francie from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I shared her worries... if I read eight hours a day at work, would I ever want to read at home? Would my eyesight begin to fail? My hands seemed strangely bare without a pair of white cotton gloves, damp with perspiration. I wanted a crisp, pink, full-skirted gingham dress and a handbag.
On the way home, I stopped at Dillard's. I pressed my palm against the dull golden hand-plates on the door and admired the way the glass pivoted on its hinges. As I entered the department store proper, I couldn't have felt more like Audrey Hepburn. You know that scene in Breakfast at Tiffany's, when she and George Peppard go into the aforementioned bourgeois place and have a ring from a Cracker Jack box engraved? I felt like that. All I was missing was a man in a gray suit at my heels, and a ridiculous hat.
Mark my words, I'm going to start to come-a-calling. And I'll give people a ring on the telephone.
And I'll talk loudly in public libraries and steal silly masks from five-and-dime stores.
You mark my words.