Madame tested, Grandma approved.

My grandmother, married to my big rig-driving grandpa, lived in an ancient farmhouse in nowhere Oklahoma. She weighed about 80 lbs, smoked like a chimney and had a silver pixie haircut over brown skin wrinkled like an anorexic sharpei. We were not related by blood obviously. They didn’t have air conditioning or a tv and spent their days on rusted chairs in the expansive yard doing crosswords or sitting around the kitchen on wicker stools talking with the endless stream of relatives and neighbors that would just stop by. Their shower was made of some kind of flagstone that was sloped wrong so every time you took a shower you had to squeegee the floor. We would visit for a week every summer and sleep upstairs with the windows open on feather mattresses (because that’s probably how they made them 75 years ago) and try to fall asleep to the deafening sound of the rain on the tin roof.  There was an attic nook for the all the grandkids that had a treasure of sad vintage toys with missing eyes and broken wheels that would probably be a goldmine of ephemera now had we known at the time.

It was like a foreign country compared to our 80's style duplex of beige carpet and Navajo White walls.  I was infinitely bored and hopelessly fascinated by everything there. Especially fascinated by her.

One visit she counted out a stack of wrinkled dollars and a bag of coins for us to take to the mall with the purpose of replenishing her stock of Chanel No. 5 perfumed powder which she wore everyday.  I never saw her wear anything other than jean shorts, a tank top and her reading glasses on a chain around her neck.  But she, and that sloping bathroom, smelled like Chanel.

When she died the funeral program listed her birthplace as Paris because no one actually knew where she came from but they all agreed she would probably have really liked to go there.  


For her it was a French perfume, for me I think it might be these gloves by Dominic Jones.

Here

Different generations huh? They have solid gold fingernails and are over $1000 dollars a pair but I don’t care. Madame Sunday wants these. BAAAAAAD.  I want these with the kind of irrational passion of a woman who would buy luxury perfume with months of hoarded nickels and quarters counted out from an old mayonnaise jar. An impractical desire for something fantastical and extravagant and yet absolutely necessary.  


Even if I'm only ever seen in ill-fitting jeans and t-shirts I want a pair to keep in a box on top of my dresser for the sole purpose of knowing they are there.  I might put them on every day for just a few minutes and then put them back in the box. Sure they cost more than anything else I own but that seems like a small price to pay for such a saucy indulgence.  


My bathroom might be covered in asbestos wallpaper and has a sloping floor too but I know where my priorities are.  


What are your indulgences?