The Day I Lost My Jingle

I was sitting in a sea of shoppers holding a piece of Mrs. Fields pecan nut fudge when it occurred to me that I had been shopping for eight hours and all I had to show for it was a T-shirt.

It’s a white T-shirt, 100% preshrunk cotton, across the front of which is the phrase “carpe diem” in strong black letters. For those unfamiliar with inspiring foreign phrases, carpe diem is Latin for seize the day.

Had I thought of it at the time I was staring into space in the eating area of a mall called the Santa Monica Place, I would have certainly appreciated the irony. I had not seized anything that day and was not likely to.

I realize that writing about shopping at Christmas is not a new idea, but for some reason it has been more trying for me this year. I think it’s probably glandular, but if it is I don’t want to know about it.

I have only one person to shop for and that’s my wife, Cinelli, but it’s not as easy as you think. In addition to December being the birthday of Jesus, it is also her birthday, so I must shop for enough gifts to fulfill my obligations to both divinities.

Two important birthdays in the same month are actually too much, so when this season passes I am going to suggest we celebrate Cinelli’s birthday later, since it is unlikely that the Christian church would consider delaying recognition of its birthday person in favor of mine.

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Cinelli’s gifts to me are always imaginative and unique, but when I asked what she wanted this year she said, “A wheelbarrow.”

It’s a legitimate request because she gardens a good deal, but somehow it seems wrong for a man to buy a woman a wheelbarrow. She should be buying me a wheelbarrow, but if she did it would sit unused and rot into the ground.

“Doesn’t it embarrass you to see me doing all the physical work around the house while you stand there watching?” she has often asked.

I’ve considered the questions many times but the answer is always the same: no, it really doesn’t. She seems to enjoy hard work and I enjoy watching, so it satisfies us both.

Shopping is also something she ought to undertake alone, but I could hardly expect her to buy her own presents while I watched, so there I was in the mall, overwhelmed.

I bought the T-shirt not for its inspiring message but because it was on an open shelf and the price was clearly marked. I don’t buy merchandise in locked cabinets or merchandise whose prices are somehow concealed.

“Ask!” Cinelli always says, but I believe that if you have to ask the price everyone will know that you can’t afford the product. I probably can’t, but that isn’t the point. Asking how much is a belittling exercise, like a lion crouched in the bushes wondering how much an eland weighs.

“That’s why you’re always broke and whining for money,” Cinelli says. What she doesn’t understand is that it’s OK to whine and beg at home, but public groveling is simply out of the question.

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I am intimidated by crowds, which also turned me into a zombie Sunday at the Santa Monica Place. Its marketing director, Robin Faulk, estimated the number of shoppers during the day at 25,000, and they were all in line in front of me most of the time.

Vast numbers of people in one area create a madness not unlike that which surges through lemurs just before they dive into the sea. It is best to expect the unexpected in a crowd. One woman, for instance, handed me her baby.

She was not trying to sell or give the infant away, but thought I was a family member who might want to see her newborn. I had been pushed into her orbit by the dynamics of the masses just as she was passing the baby around and she absently handed it to me.

I said “No thank you” as politely as possible and left without the baby. I’m not going to tell Cinelli of the incident because she’ll say, “Did you ask the price?” I don’t want another baby at the moment, even on sale.

The whole thing gave me a distorted notion of reality. I lost all sense of time and space and at one point imagined myself swimming frantically across the surface of a martini trying to escape the olive.

That was it. I’d had it with the crowds. “Carpe diem!” I shouted and headed out the door and into the Broadway Bar & Grill across the street.

I ordered a martini as a means of confronting my delusion, and it worked. I didn’t swim across the surface of the vodka sea exactly, but I did drain the little ocean dry.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.