I took my daughter clothes shopping the other day, and therein lies a tale.
“She needs new clothes”, I overheard the missus say to one of our friends the other day. “She outgrows them so rapidly”
“I’ll take her shopping,” I offered, as I had nothing else planned for the day. As I’m nothing if not a truthful chronicler of events, I must report that the next several minutes were full of peals of laughter.
I drew myself up to my full, and not inconsiderable height. I have, I pointed out (and I may have done so sniffily) successfully reached middle age, raised a young family, done reasonably well for myself and been a reasonably good parent. Surely, I went on, a shopping expedition with my young ‘un shouldn’t be the occasion for mirth you are making it out to be.
And that is how I and my offspring found myself in a car, headed towards the inner circle of hell, known to other Punekars as Phoenix Market City.
“I want”, said the young one conversationally, “peplums”.
This gladdened my heart. As regular readers of this column will know, I’m a foodie at heart, and it was gratifying to know that the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree.
Sure!”, I said. “Let’s finish the clothes shopping first, and we’ll pick them up after.
This puzzled the young one, which in turn puzzled me. Subsequent conversation elucidated for me (and amused the other party in the conversation no end) the fact that she wasn’t talking about a fruit, but rather about a kind of dress.
I am still, I confess, mostly unclear about what kind of dress it is exactly. I won’t know one if you paraded it in front of me. But I know of its existence, and that is an improvement over the week gone by.
I wish I could report that the rest of the expedition went off smoothly, but that would be lying at a level I am not comfortable with. Carl Linneaus, it turns out, was a rank amateur at nomenclature.
I can’t be sure of the exact number, but there are at least three dozen kinds of pants that end around the knees.
Not just three dozen kinds of pants, let me repeat. Three dozen kinds of pants that end around the knees. In my day, there were shorts, and there were full pants, and that was it. I discovered three-fourths when Rafael Nadal started to play tennis.
I have been married for almost a decade now, and have therefore fought the great colour classification battles many times. Still, I was unprepared for the level of sophistication that exists today. Blush, back when I was the right side of twenty, is what maidens did upon sighting a knight.
Today, one can get a spaghetti in blush, and we’re talking neither food nor romance. Cerulean, it turns out, is a shade of blue. And pantone is not an antonym for taking one’s trousers off – it is, I am reliably informed, a shade of yellow.
After multiple, seemingly never-ending hours of this, an increasingly befuddled father and an increasingly exasperated daughter made their weary way home. Sans plums.
And here, dear reader, is the coda to this sorry saga.
My daughter will, this September, become all of five years old. My bones shall shiver for eight long years.
~~
He doesn't expect the paradox to be resolved in his lifetime
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