Into the den of girl clothes

This is my weekly column for the Sunday, Nov. 23, 2008 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. I used a version of this story for my Saturday essay on KAXE.

Into the den of girl clothes
By Aaron J. Brown

Like others, I did many things for the first time during my freshman year of college. For today’s purposes let’s focus on the first time I ever bought a shirt for another person. Not just any person, but a girl. It was shopping season in Iowa and I was preparing to return home for Christmas to see my family, my friends, my native land of the Iron Range, but most importantly to visit Christina, my girlfriend, later wife and eventual mother of our three small children. I think it’s three. I may have lost count. Anyway, back to the 1990s. Bill Clinton is President. Billy Joel is not yet on the oldies stations. The Internet is for nerds only. I must buy a blue shirt for my girlfriend for Christmas at the Kennedy Mall in Dubuque.

Where does one buy a blue girl shirt, specifically a sweater, which in my mind was what people in relationships were supposed to exchange? Where does one buy any shirt in a strange land like Iowa? As an Iron Ranger I was used to sparse retail options. And there just isn’t much in the price range of a student paying his way through college with a job in radio journalism. Wandering the mall like an immigrant I fled to the familiar confines of JC Penney.

At Penney’s, things seemed much easier. You had your old lady clothes over there. Your younger lady clothes over here. And, over there, the girly style clothes I knew darn well she’d never wear. Like Goldilocks, I was going for what seemed “just right.” Milling around the sweater section, a young saleswoman approached. She was probably my age but seasoned in the business of selling girl shirts to people with flop sweat.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I’m looking for a sweater … for my girlfriend … for Christmas,” I replied, thinking that would suffice. I assumed she would pull out special box from some special lady treasure chest containing the exact sweater that boys were supposed to give girls who were more than friends. And, to this day, I give great credit to this woman for accepting the premise that “blue sweater” was the best way to go for my first Christmas with a girlfriend.

“What size is she?” asked the saleswoman.

Size? Well, she’s smaller than me. She’s bigger than a child or a tripod, I suppose. She’s smaller than an ATM, that’s for sure. She’s not short but also not tall. Not heavy. Definitely not heavy. Don’t want to convey that notion. What to say … what to say?

“I suppose,” I said, “she’d be about your size.” Whether this was true or not, I have no idea. It’s true this woman was about Christina’s height but as for other proportions I was purely guessing. It mystified me then as it still does. Girl clothes are sized on some kind of exponential scale. As they get smaller the numbers get closer together but never touch zero. Even when sized using guy-friendly words like small, medium and large they are not universal, nor predictable.

Then there was the matter of style. The woman, mercifully, steered me away from a little number that had buttons to a soft, blue v-neck that would be my final choice. Medium. Can’t go wrong with medium.

In the years since this first Christmas, I’ve learned to simply stick to the list I’m provided in so far as gifts are concerned. Our first Christmas living together I bought Christina a food processor, which is appalling from a feminist perspective, but exactly what she wanted and still in our cabinet. The years tick by, but each gift is special – whether birthday, Christmas, anniversary or, more recently, Mothers Day. Each one, however, is only an affirmation of that first one: the trip into the den of girl clothes to buy the sweater that would say, “Stay warm, if not stylish, because I want you to stick with me through the winter.”

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune. Contact him or read more at his blog, MinnesotaBrown.com. His new book “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range” is out now.

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