I really hate shopping. It should be considered a handicap in this world.

I shouldn't use the word 'hate', it is too strong, except for the fact that it is the word that comes to mind. Let me say that shopping in all its forms is an unpleasant experience for me. This is not only a problem in regular stores, but also street markets, fairs, sidewalk sales, internet, food stores...you get the point.

There are several contributing factors. I don't know who I am is one problem. (more about that later) When I was a kid, my mother took me to very few stores. In fact the first store I remember going to was a  day after Thanksgiving sale in a department store in Pennsylvania. I was probably 11. I got a winter coat, but I would have much rather stayed home with my grand mother. Almost all our food was delivered to the house in those days. I have no memory of going to a food market.

I remember lusting after a bathing suit in junior high. I saw it on a friend and my mother got me one. I sewed a lot of my clothes and they were all picked out from magazines. I kid you not, I have no memory of going shopping. When I wanted a felt poodle skirt for ice skating, we made it. Once, I went to The English shop with Mom and the clerk brought out a few things. There was almost nothing on the racks. She showed me what I would like and found the right size. That suited me.

Years later and on a much tighter budget, I was so happy to see big stores that had huge choices. But that didn't work either because they overwhelm me and I get bored in two minutes. This problem has gotten worse and worse.

Living in England where my friends were so excited by Jumble Sales at the churches, I ran in, grabbed what we desperately needed and fled. Mostly I sat outside and read while other people shopped. I had to go to stores in Sussex almost daily because at that time they sold things in 1/4 pound lots and we ate a lot. I hated the meat stores with the geese and chickens hanging upside down with the blood pooling in their faces. Awful thing.

When I had a lot of kids living with me in Marblehead, MA, I had the natural food wholesale truck come to the house once a month. I bought fish at the fish market and veggies at the fruit market. That worked. By then I could send the kids to the stores, anyway.

Fortunately, my sister and my daughters are champion shoppers. On any given day I can look at the clothes and jewelry I am wearing and make a mental map of who gave me what when. On the Camino, I realized that virtually everything in my pack and on my body was gifted to me. What kind of a case am I?

My worst thing is fairs. I liked the Pendleton Roundup because it was all about action. But the idea of wandering around hot dusty rows looking at mostly highly mediocre junk, homemade or not, brings out the inner snob in me. I look at virtually everything as stuff I wouldn't know whether to toss or put in a yard sale tomorrow.

So the inner snob. I love art museums and I mostly dislike galleries. In museums, I can choose what I want to spend time with. In galleries, it feels too much like shopping. Don't get me wrong! I love beauty and beautiful things. One day in Manhattan, my friend and I were feeling low. We got dolled up a bit (limited in my case) and went to Barneys and spent a few hours trying on $30,000 strings of pink pearls. It was a definite pick-me-up.

That brings me to the "I don't know who I am" statement. If I had all the money and all the time in the world and I were to buy clothes or a house or furnish a house, I have no idea what style I would choose. Since most of my life I have been a 'second hand Rose', I am pretty plain. I don't know whether I would have gone for the million dollar casual southwest turquoise, suede look, or maybe a Dallas look with tons of jewelry, face lifts, designer clothes, or maybe Italian high fashion. I don't know. I rather suspect that I would come out looking pretty much exactly the same. I think that in my not knowing, I have chosen over and over to be who I am.