Shopping Mai

Sunshine Mai has a new name. It is Shopping Mai. Or for short, the Shopper. This young Japanese lady has graced our home for about seven days now and she has been shopping for about . . . seven days now. I picked her up from Brookdale Mall yesterday. Today it was the Mall of America. Before that it was Ridgedale Mall and . . . .

Japanese are very busy people she loves to tell me. And now I know why. They spend all their time shopping. Well, according to her that is the female’s responsibility in their culture, while the male’s duty is to make enough to support this habit. This in turn necessitates that the Japanese dominate the world’s economy.

With so much shopping to do, their country must really crank out the cars, and TVs and computers and cameras and everything else that has a battery or a motor.

But I think I prefer her as the Sunshine one, even though I am the grateful recipient of her shopping sprees. I have consumed more chocolate this week than I have for the previous six months. My palate is being retrained to crave that sweet brown stuff. And I kinda like it. It makes coffee taste even better!! Hard to imagine, isn’t it?

Sunday night we barged in on some friends unexpectedly. We had found a black jacket in our van and thought it belonged to Lis. And since it was on our way home we thought we would return it. It wasn’t hers. But they did have carmel apple pie!!! And they did have ice cream!!! And they had just started watching a movie, so we were invited in to join them in view Man of La Mancha. I had never seen it before, so we decided to stay and watch. Based on the novel by Miguel Cervantes, it was an odd film. We could only stay for the first half, but it was enough to see Don Quixote calling the buxom Sophia Loren by the name Dulcinea, a name more endearing and positive that the name by which she was know to the rest of the crowd.

I suppose that’s a good example of how we should speak to others, calling them by names to strive for instead of one’s to avoid. So Sunshine it is. Leave the name “Shopper” for a cheaply-printed advertising supplement.

Free Trivia to impress your friends with: Cervantes died on the exact day as another famous writer, Sir Bill Shakespeare.