TA$TE

My mother has always hated to go shopping. It was one of the anomalies I experienced as a child growing up in Texas -- my mother was not a typical Texas mother. Other people's mothers loved to shop, shopped on vacation even. My mother couldn't fathom shopping on vacation! Why, that's what you went on vacation to escape, mundanities such as shopping. She didn't like to shop (a bore, it made her feet hurt), didn't want me to be a cheerleader (it's silly, beneath you), begged me not to join a sorority (all that singing together and iced tea), and offered to give me the money she'd spend on my wedding if I'd elope (buy a house! are you sure you don't want the money?). My mother is a pragmatist.

So, when we went shopping we always got tickled about something in the dressing room and completely lost control of ourselves. Regardless of whether she enjoyed shopping or not, my mother, like my grandmother before her, would not buy cheap clothes. And never, NEVER, buy cheap shoes. My mother would rather go barefoot than wear cheap shoes, and she got that from my Granny. Granny never told me that I could learn a lot about a person by walking in his shoes, she said, "You can tell a lot about a person by the shoes they wear." I think she was wearing Ferragamo's when she died.

When we went shopping, it seemed that we'd look and look for something (we were always shopping for something specific; my mother didn't just shop for no reason, she hated it too much) and I'd invariably find one single thing I liked -- and it was always the most expensive thing in the store. My mother used to always say, "Well Paige, you've got good taste" or, "Paige, you sure have expensive taste" or finally, "you have your father's taste."

My father always said you couldn't buy taste - you either had it or you didn't, it was either bred into you or it wasn't. He grew up not rich, but his father had a college education and was a teacher and his mother loved the finer things, she adored china and silver with such a passion that I have full sets of china and crystal for any occasion. Dessert teas, ladies luncheon, you name it: I have a specific set of china for the occasion. Daddy used to point people out at our country club who were rich rich rich but whose taste was all in their mouths. Those were the people about whom he said, "Squirrel, money can't buy taste."

I have those same eyes now. I see these awful, gargantuan houses and I hear my father's voice in my head, 'money doesn't buy taste.' I hear my mother's voice in my head when I browse online at Nordstrom.com and finally see something I think is cute and it's always like $498 bucks. "Paige, you sure have expensive tastes." I'm not saying I spend that on a wear-to-work dress, I'm just saying, that's what I like.