The Pickle Lady

The summer after high school, I worked at a Christmas ornament store in a small resort town in Wisconsin. Selling Christmas crap in the middle of summer is essentially the same as selling anything else that is gratuitously unneeded. The majority of our customers were middle-aged women, many of whom I suspect were shopping junkies trying to get their high on with an inexpensive hit to temporarily appease their addiction. With her milquetoast husband in tow, our typical customer would buy one or two ornaments and be on her way to the windsock store (not to be confused with the store selling windchimes). I may as well have been selling t-shirts or mugs that said, "I like to buy needless shit in my free time."

As you might imagine, it was a boring job -- the type of boring that waves a giant red flag in front of me, inducing mischief in a misguided attempt to stave off death by boredom. One of my favorite activities was spying on the Pickle Lady who worked in the deli at the supermarket next door. I was obsessed with her. Every day I would go to the deli during my lunch break and buy a pickle from her, just to see what she was wearing.

The Pickle Lady was probably in her late 40s, with white tortoise shell cat-eye glasses and a pin-curled hairdo right out of an episode of "I Love Lucy." Banishing the polyester pantsuit of the early 1980s to someone else's closet, she always wore skirts or dresses from the 1950s, including a navy A-line dress with white polka dots that I can picture even today. Her hair, makeup, and clothes were so jarringly old timey -- 25 years out of date in 1982 -- she could have been one of those historical reenactment park actors. Instead of a Revolutionary War woman demonstrating the butter churn at Sturbridge Village, she would have played the part of the greasy-spoon waitress at the 1950s Small Town America historical park. She was a living anachronism.

This is how my 13-year-old daughter sees me. I am her pickle lady, the one she delights in observing for her hopelessly unfashionable looks and manner. When she needs a laugh, she will ask me what I think certain current teen slang words mean. When I tell her I haven't heard that word used on Prairie Home Companion or Downton Abbey, so I don't know what it means, she rolls her eyes and looks at me with a mixture of bewilderment, pity, and exasperation. She doesn't understand my utter lack of giving-a-shit about maintaining an appearance of what passes for cool in middle school. When I remind her that I'm a middle-aged woman, and no, I don't want to wear skinny jeans and a lace peplum, instead of my bermuda shorts and a t-shirt, she looks at me as if I've just told her to put me on an ice floe and push me out to sea.

I find it funny that she hasn't figured out that we have different comfort zones. She has her middle-school comfort zone (surely "middle-school comfort zone" is the biggest oxymoron ever uttered), while I have my middle-aged zone of comfort that includes frosty pink lipstick, regularly dyeing the gray out of my hair, keeping my bra straps hidden at all times, and shunning skinny jeans. Although it's probably more accurate to say skinny jeans shun me.

The simple truth is, as a parent, I will never be cool, no matter what I look like or what I say. At first glance that might seem unfair or harsh, but it's really a gift. It gives you permission to live authentically, which is just Oprah-speak for dorking it up in a big way. Make sure you say "Howdy" if you bump into me at the windsock store as I go about my business living authentically. I'll be the one in the t-shirt that says, "I like to dork it up in my free time."