get yer hot peanuts at Sears!

My mom usually took me with her when she left the house for errands but left my two brothers behind. My brother Chuck, one year older and my brother Joe one year younger would half fend for themselves and half be under the nominal supervision of a neighboring mom, as in "if something goes wrong, you can call Mrs. Danaher".

My took me, and continued to take me along with her even as I had more brothers and she left the little ones at home with the big ones, because my older brother, Chuck the Fuck, was usually cruel to me. He liked to physically attack me, did our Chuckie. He also hada hideous talent for verbal abuse.

So. When mom had to go to once a week evening trainings for being a Girl Scout leader, even though the women were asked not to bring kids along, she brought me with a book, coloring book or something to occupy me. I would sit in the back of the room and try to be invisible.

I often tried to be invisible in my childhood. And I thought I was pretty good at it.

What I liked most was when mom ran errands and took me, but no brothers.

and how I loved to go to Sears with her. I got my first bra at a Sears store, fitted by the salesperson, my mother oddly, to me, disengaged from this often important event in a girl's life. I felt shame that my mom did not want to see me in any bras. she told the clerk to decide what fit me.

Mom liked wallpaper. She was capable of poring over wallpaper books for what seemed, to little girl me, very long sessions. I would look at wallpaper books for awhile but grew bored.

And that was when my payoff for going to SEars would appear. It would appear when mom wanted me distracted and away from her, if possible. She would give me ten cents and tell me to go to the hot nuts case, where a few kinds of hot nuts, kept hot under heat lights, were on sale by the pound. Salted Spanish peanuts must have cost .30 a pound in those days because ten cents bought one third of a pound.  In our family, snacks were divvied out so all got an equal share, and that equal share was usually very small. But one third of a pound of hot salty peanuts was an amazing score, even when mom ate some. And another payoff:  telling my brothers about the peanuts. My bros would be jealous and insist that next time, mom should make me save them a fair, even share of my peanuts.

My mom only rarely showed me even slight favoritism. I can't speak for any favoritism she might have shared with my brothers. But one third pound of hot salty Spanish peanuts was a luxurious as my childhood got.

And yes, I take no pride in this disclosure, I showed off to my brothers about the peanuts.

I loved those hot peanuts. I loved eating them. I loved feeling their warmth in my pocket when mom and I left Sears and waited for a bus to get us home. The heat would end around the time I finished that snack.

So Sears has always meant hot salted peanuts for me.

Another mom trick for when we went downtown. Sears was near our South Side home. Downtown trips were less common. We always had lunch in the Walnut Room at Marshall Field's, back when there was only one Marshall Fields and it was on State Street, Chicago's main downtown street. How I loved lunch in that walnut lined tea room. To my childhood self, it was the height of refinement and fine dining.

After we finished shopping, and we only shopped at Field's, as we waited for our first bus home (we had to transfer at Archer Ave), mom would go into one of the big downtown movie theaters, where they used to show all movies first and going to the movies at these movie palaces was also a special outing but not one I recall ever experiencing. I heard tell. Mom would go in and buy me a bag or box (no tubs back then) of hot buttered popcorn.

It was so lovely, munching on hot buttered popcorn on a cold Chicago afternoon.

And, once again, I had something to show off to my brothers. Mom always told me not to tell. I always did. I had very little that my brothers coveted. To the best of my recollection, Chuck covereted my hot peanuts and my hot buttered popcorn.

Joe was okay.

And another thing we did on these outings, which seemed to keep my brothers from joining us, is we went to the Chicago Art Institute. We went to that museum at least once a month. Mom saw it as a girl thing. My bros had no interest in art.

The Chicago Art Institute has (or had, for all I know) a dark room filled with lit vitrines filled with miniature rooms. Each room would have furniture from a particular era in furniture design, each window a room. Sometimes two rooms stop one another. It was called the miniatures. Mom often left me there alone while she looked at grown up art. Imagine leaving a child alone in a darkened exhibit.

I loved that miniature room. I would pore over the details of each room, imagining children in those rooms living lives very different from my own. Happy lives.