Today Was a Fairytale

I drive the same route to work every morning, and every single morning, there are little things that catch my eye, like the fact that there's always a Jeep Wrangler parked on the side of the road by the Monticello Avenue-Ridge Street intersection with part of the driver's window zipped-down. I wonder if the Jeep ever gets parking tickets, if it's a getaway car for some intense organized crime operation, if people constantly try to hijack its stereo only to discover that because the window's been open, the stereo is shot from the moisture, or if it belongs to a volunteer at the Salvation Army nestled behind the "parking space." I also notice businesses and buildings that I've never seen that have most likely been standing longer than I've been in the world, but hey, I'm always learning something new each day. On this morning's drive to work, I was rockin' out to T. Swift's new song "Today Was a Fairytale" (Irony like this is hard to come by-you'll know what I mean by the end of this...) and I would've been only 1.5 minutes away from work had the dab burned stoplight not turned red (I'm always very tempted to run yellow lights, but I'm trying to work on that since I think it's kind of cutting it close, and apparently there's a law or something that says you're not supposed to speed up when the light turns yellow. Go figure.). So I'm sitting at the red light and I look over at this sketchy furniture store whose sign reads "[can't remember the first word] Furniture: Antique, Old, New, Used, Restored Furniture," and in the window draped on the most nineteen-eighty-fied mannequin was, I'm assuming a pre-worn, white, pouffey wedding gown circa 1992. The kind your Barbie wore. I repeat, pouffy sleeves. No wait, pouffy SHORT SLEEVES. I can understand that maybe after a woman is divorced that she'd naturally want to rid herself of any traces of the memory of her promise to spend the rest of her life with a man she's clearly not spending the rest of her life with. When I saw this dress, I immediately was taken back to the 1990s summer yard sale extravaganzas that my mom and her friends used to have beside of the old Post Office (turned video rental store, turned current dialysis center) in Lebanon. Yard sales were kind of cool if you were a kid for a couple of reasons: 1) Your bank account usually consisted of less than $20 and everything kids want at a yard sale costs less than a dollar and 2) The phrase "Turn your trash into someone else's treasure" could go more like this: Turn someone else's trash into my treasure that my mom will have to haggle away from me to sell next summer at this very spot; the only difference is that it will be on a different table and cost $0.75 less. Anyways, at one of these yard sales, my brother, Bets and I were drinking away our limited stock of $0.25/cup lemonade (we made a huge profit, you can imagine) and one of the "sellers" with whom we went to church rolls up in her van, pulls out her wedding dress and rigs up some method of hanging it on the open door of her van to sell at this shindig. I'll never forget it; we were all astounded. She was selling it for $100.00, but here's the kicker. This lady was a happily-married-to-the-same-man kind of gal; she was just selling her wedding dress because she didn't want to fool with it anymore. We all wondered, What if her daughter Alyssa would've wanted to wear it? Anyways, I always thought that was funny and a little bit tragic, even though theoretically, you only wear a wedding dress one time and then the rest is history and a big box taking up too much real estate in your attic. What a megaepic memory while driving to work. I think it would be funny if somebody opened a shop called Turn Yesterday's Fairytale Into Today: Antique, Used, & Restored Wedding Dresses, and when you sold/consigned your old wedding dress to them, their policy required you to include a 100 words or less blurb about why you're selling/donating your dress to the store. Maybe something like this already exists, but all I know is that it'd be some of the most hilarious reading material on the planet. By the way, Happy March everybody! When March arrives, the weather may still be freezing, but at least the dreariest month of the year is over with and gone; here's to being closer to spring!