Yolanda

What's this atavistic dress shop got to do with anything ?

There it sits, on rather outre piece of Route 60, cinderblock white, with that outlandish limo poised outside, and that window -- with its daily gown tableau -- displaying garments that are as foreign to my own sartorial habits ("Dr. T. dresses like a farmer") as martian attire.

I confess: I love the place. I deeply approve of it.

Passing it in my car, I slow down to get whatever safe glimpse I can of the latest dress in the window. They are SO beautiful. I love that they exist, and that women exist who wear them, and are beautiful in them.

This may sound odd from the unnatural woman who nearly anaphylaxes at the thought of an off-hours sprint into TJMaxx to replace the last remaining unripped and unstained garment that she's accidentally dyed pink in the wash because aluminum foil and paper towels are all that remain to wear to work.

Not that I'd ever go IN Yolanda's, mind you. My God. A contemptuous Butler with a fumigator's backpack would snuff me in a trice, roach that I am. Begone, woman beyond make-over.

Two weeks in an Aspen collar, an accumulating deficit of showers and hairwashes have done nothing for my already sagging self image. I'm probably growing a beard under this thing.

DK took me on an errand last night. I had to buy thank you note cards for the funerary bank of flowers wilting in our den, and soymilk creamer, the sine qua non of my totally fucked-up vegan lifestyle. The world seemed surreal after my recent hiatus from it. They'd gutted the drugstore, and it seemed stripped, dismantled, and remantled into an alien parallel universe drugstore. I noted a solid wall of women's faces: the hair dye aisle. None of them seemed a day over 20. WTF, I asked my dear spouse, gesticulating wildly at the greasy gray scraggles attractively framing my Aspen collar, none of these women even NEED to dye their hair !!!

I will dwell on it no more. Nor on the clear plastic baseball bats filled with sunflower seeds. Nor on any other aspect of that sad hell of consumable effluvium. Only to say that I asked DK "How many people commit suicide in these aisles on a daily basis from the sheer ugliness of this place ?" He, bless him, did not know.

The moon was wonderful. We agreed it lacked a tiny bit of its left side. I thought about moons not bearing grudges as I always do, thanks a lot brain stuck forever in college lit courses, and we got the soymilk, and that was that.

So why Yolanda ?

I'm trying to fit it into a poem alongside Glastonbury Abbey. Lauds. Praise for beautiful things that exist, but from which I am excluded.