Shopping with a 9 year old - and other holiday lessons

It's good to see that at 9 years old my niece Julia is learning about Justice. That's the name of her favorite store and one of the highlights of my pre-holiday trip was taking her and my mother shopping for a full day two Sundays before Christmas in Reno.

At her young age, my sweet niece has shopping down to a science, and I figured out her methodology. She circles the store once, scanning for items. On the second pass she narrows her choices. And on third inspection she chooses what to try on, or in the case of buying for someone else, what she wants.

My sister hopes the technique soon encompasses looking for sale items. However she has put a cap on the number of things to be bought in any one trip - though I did give in for an extra top, a pack of gum, some lip balm and some ice cream on the way home.

A full day of this just made my old mother cranky. She's more of an impulse buyer and I remember the family fights about credit card bills that prove this.

As for Julia, she's partial to pastels and spaghetti straps which Justice serves along with chirpy girl power music playing in the background. I told Julia that since she lives in the mountains and probably weighs 50 pounds, tops, she should really buy heavier clothing than this place stocks. But I guess she layers.

Still too young for a Blackberry, Julia had a hand-written list with her which included a gift card for her grandparents from Target, dog treats, and a question mark for her twin brother. For her dad it was a trip to the Apple store for an iPod dock, sold to us by one of those Apple dudes who seems way too purposely nerdy hipster to not be an actor. Mom loves lotions, I learned, and I left Bed, Bath and Body Works smelling like a Christmas cookie.

And I was warned about flirting with the sales lady at J Jill.

"I don't like it when you do that," Julia scolded.

"Well, you are the one who told me I need a girlfriend," I reminded.

We had to shop for a friend of hers, too - at the Gap for Kids, because: A) the clothes at Justice fit too tight for her pal and B) friends can't wear clothes from the same store.

Being a good uncle, the only guy thing I made the ladies do was go to Buffalo Wild Wings for lunch, which is hardly a tea party at the American Girl Store, but at least they had Mac and Cheese.

Shopping wasn't the only thing I learned on my trip. I took a ski lesson, too. It turned into a private one because the home schooled high school girls grouped with me were way better at it than I am and probably ever will be. I over think most everything in my life, am as stiff as a drink from a bartender looking for good tips, and am over 40 - all of which are not good things for heading down a mountain.

However, a couple months ago I went to a ski show and met people in various ski clubs, most of whom appeared older and fatter than me. It was inspirational.

My instructor George E (which seems like an Internet name if you ask me) was/is in his 50s, too. He asked me, in a good way, why I was taking a lesson.

Well, my book of regrets is getting to be a multi-volume set, I wanted to say. So I am making up for it before I get my AARP card in ways I don't even understand. Instead I offered that it would give my niece and nephew something to talk about, and that in my job I like that I get to try new things, both of which are also true.

Well, despite George's best efforts, once I got off the bunny hill and onto an actual slope, my old habits appeared, meaning I couldn't relax, and got freaked out by speed, meaning I wiped out twice and started to pant like a scared rabbit.

But hey, my brother in law won't go on roller coasters. And my nephew cries at Disney cartoons. So what if they can rip down a cliff.

I went back to the kiddy run for the rest of the day, my sister kindly tagging along with her klutzy relative.

Tired, some old habits surfaced at dinner that night, too. With Christmas music playing and married couples and kids around me, I got a case of lonely. In my media-driven mind the holiday archetype is an imaginary post-World War II America (maybe the 50s, no later than when Kennedy's assassination) with Sinatra singing carols in the background. Uncles wear cloth topcoats and slacks, aunts wear cocktail dresses and the kids play in another room while the adults get drunk on Manhattans.

I've seen the photos of my parents back in the day when people first fell for those Norman Rockwell paintings. I have the baby picture of me in the black shorts, red vest and tie, and baby blues. Yes, once I was cute and cuddly, too, and born on Christmas Eve to boot.

It doesn't help that when I was a freshman in high school my dad disappeared a month or so before Christmas, returning occasionally and for good sometime my sophomore year. He's never really said where he went, never really offered an apology or explanation.

Which brings up something else I learned on vacation. When he argues with my brother and mother - an arguing is embedded in the family genes - my brother claims my dad sometimes still says, "I never should have come back."

Flashing forward to later in my trip, hearing that made me sad. Of course, I had been drinking Guinness at a Cajun restaurant NOLA (not to be confused with Kelly's Cajun at the mall, which is neither Irish or Cajun, but Asian) in the hotbed of IPO Internet capitalism, Palo Alto. I got to hear guys from Yahoo tout the merits of Ron Paul. What could be more libertarian than the Web, I thought, so it sort of made sense they liked this guy, the Dennis Kucinich of the GOP.

A history professor talked about a cheating scandal at his junior college where people bought A's for $4,000 or traded fixed grades for sexual favors. Some went on to earn degrees at Stanford and Cal that are going to be rescinded. He said that George W. Bush is the worst president. Ever. Hey, when you are drinking discussions tend to veer.

Yeah, my dad should never have come back home. He's got two kids living in two of the prettiest places in the country, one with an apartment two blocks from the ocean, one with a bright family of her own living near Lake Tahoe. They have some interesting friends and associates like the ones I met at my bro in law's work party. He gets to spend his Golden Years with them.

And shopping one day my sister and I bumped into a former neighbor of hers my dad should meet. In the last 18 months, she got a divorce which probably involved infidelity on the part of one or both; she had cervical and skin cancer; and her daughter by her first husband found that dude in a drunken stupor and had to get her old man checked into a rehab clinic.

This lady appeared to be making a go of it, not just sitting on her ass - which is a lesson I know all too well from my own last year or so: Keep moving. Fight the tendency toward inertia. Sometimes that's the best you can do, maybe all you can do.

Still, I tend to fall into old family ways myself on my visits West. Old dynamics die hard. I wish I had more to talk about with my brother. He worked late the one day I spent with just him. We went Christmas shopping at a bookstore. It was barely 8:30 when we finished. I offered to buy him a drink but he wanted to get home to do a load of laundry as he was leaving for my sister's after dropping me at the airport (3 hours early so he could get a ride from a friend).

I am afraid to tease him about things like that. I am a smart ass, and he is not, so we spend a lot of quiet time on those occasions when we hang out. I catch my breath, which sounds like a sigh, which doesn't help. But words would only be worse.

So I headed home before Christmas, as I usually do. Don't get me wrong. It was a nice visit, just not falling on the one day where there are too many ghosts, most of them of my own making.

I spent a relatively peaceful time with my whole nuclear family with nary an atomic explosion, not even any radioactive fallout. Sure I am being melodramatic - and what I mostly avoided, which isn't such a bad thing. Oh, I also came home with a digital camera and a cool pair of sunglasses so I have my gifts in advance.