Forgot My Passport

Ever go fantasy shopping? Y’know, you go window shopping for something you’d like but in all likelihood will  never have?

Hubby and I decided to go fantasy shopping last fall at a store that had 1 item we’ll never have, 1 item we might have some day, and 1 item we thought we’d buy that day. We thought it would be a fun trip, y’know, look around and dream, maybe come home with something. Unfortunately, I didn’t dress for the trip and our zip code ratted us out.

See, the store we went to is in O., the snooty town around here. I’m in Lansing, in mid-Michigan, so snooty is pretty relative. You put the center of a protractor on my town and draw a radius of almost any size around it and you’re going to get field, corn field, field. Lansing itself is a factory town. Omm, where the factories have shut down. The biggest employers are the state government and Michigan State University in East Lansing. It’s a very ordinary place. We’re not “cool,” we admit it. 20 miles away they have different aspirations. There’s a little joke about O. – that you have to have a passport to get in.

So there’s a store in O. that has all three items on our fantasy shopping list. I’m in sweat pants and a plain, mostly cotton shirt. Hair is in a ponytail (which is not a sexy look for me, I’ll give you that),  sneakers. Hubby is in weekend pants and a T-shirt.

The first thing we ask about is the thing we might have: a gas fireplace. We thought we’d like to convert the wood-burning fireplace in the family room to gas. We even went so far as to put a gas line in the little storage room behind the fireplace. We figured that would be the most expensive part so Hubby and Stud Boy #1 did it a year or so after we moved in. We budgeted $900 for the rest of the project – the part someone else would have to do and the materials to along with it – and figured we would save that and see if it was still a priority when that much had been put aside.

The sales pitch started out slow. The kind of sales pitch where they ask you what you’d like to drink. They double-teamed us from the start. They had a lovely display room. You start talking about models and no one is talking about prices. They break out a catalog and the catalog has no prices. I get the clue that $900 won’t exactly cover it. When they’ve finally seated us to discuss the type of “log” we’d like (because, after all, the warm glow of the look of the fake log is what makes the gas fireplace “homey”), the adding machine comes out. $4,500 to start. We smile politely and say this is out of our price range. They ask where we live. We say Lansing. The salespeople smile politely. They suggest someone in “our” town that does this type of work. I am not even kidding.

This place also sells outdoor furniture and that’s the item we thought we would buy that day (I didn’t intend to impose my ponytail on them with no remuneration). Hubby has a nice chair for outdoors that Stud Boy got him as a gift one year but the one I use is of the $14.99 from K-mart 15 years ago variety. We thought, cool, we’ll get Snakelady a nice chair for whiling away the warm evenings.

The outdoor furniture also has no prices but I figure, hey, I’ve priced these things at Lowe’s, I have a pretty good idea of what this is going to be. They have some NICE outdoor chairs – rockers with mold-resistant fibers. I pick my favorite two and go get prices. Over $300 a piece. I say politely that is out of my price range. Out of my LANSING ZIP CODE price range.

The final fantasy item that this place sells are hot tubs. Hubby yearns for a hot tub. While I purused chairs he examines an 8-seater hot tub. By this point it is embarassingly obvious that we won’t be buying anything. They’re very, very, very polite. When we go to leave they walk us out. I’ve been walked out of stores before but I’ve never gotten the feeling that it was to make sure we’d actually leave.