“When are we going to the gift shop?” <\/p>\n
Those were the words from my daughter. It was the 3,200th time I had heard it. In the last 20 minutes. <\/p>\n
We were in the nation’s capital. In the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. We were surrounded \u2014 literally swarmed \u2014 by towering rockets, Mars landers, lunar rocks, Wright brothers planes and lots of lost tourists who thought they were at the White House. They couldn’t figure out why there were satellites hanging from the president’s ceiling.<\/p>\n
“Look at this!” I told my daughter. “An actual Apollo command module! This thing went into space. See the burn marks from re-entry. See! See! See!”<\/p>\n
“Eh,” she said. “Now, is the gift shop upstairs or down?”<\/p>\n
Aaaghhh!
\n<\/p>\n
There was $25 burning a hole in her pocket. My mother had put it in her pocket. She needed to get it out of her pocket and into the nearest gift shop cash register as quick as she could. It\u2019s a childhood rule. <\/p>\n
I had been in three Smithsonian museums, but had seen more sweatshirts, key chains and dinosaur puzzles than actual exhibits. All the kid wanted to see was the were the gift shops, and the Hope Diamond (which she heard you could purchase in gift shop.) <\/p>\n
But a funny thing happened as I visited trinket-land after trinket-land: I secretly wanted to run around and touch everything. <\/p>\n
Because, come on! It was a museum gift shop. And I was a kid once. Remember what it was like to be a kid? Gift shops were the Holy Grail. The motherland. The summertime equivalent of Christmas. Even better in some ways. You could pick whatever you wanted, and never had to worry about ending up with socks. <\/p>\n
Grandparents had stuffed wads of cash in your pockets and there was only one restriction on it: \u201cBuy something nice.\u201d <\/p>\n
Something nice?!? It was ALL nice! Shoot, you could buy until the zipper on your suitcase burst and the airline warned you the weight would pop the plane tires. <\/p>\n
I was taken back to those days by the models of the space shuttle. The bags of shredded money. I never understood the irony of that one as a kid \u2014 how I was trading real money for a bag of worthless money. There were insects preserved in blocks of clear plastic. Turquoise gems on necklaces. Little boys could never wear the necklaces. Not if they didn\u2019t want to get beaten up on the schoolyard. But that didn\u2019t stop us from buying them. And, of course, dehydrated astronaut food \u2014 ice cream in assorted flavors, along with peaches and strawberries and bananas. Chalky and sweet, it is to this day possibly the best thing I\u2019ve ever eaten. <\/p>\n
Oh, museum gift shop. As an adult we have such a love-hate relationshop \u2026 I mean \u2026 ship. As much as I wanted to leave, there was still that 25 burning a hole in my daughter\u2019s pocket. And that could buy a whole lot of freeze-dried ice cream. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“When are we going to the gift shop?” Those were the words from my daughter. It was the 3,200th time I had heard it. In the last 20 minutes. We were in the nation’s capital. In the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. We were surrounded \u2014 literally swarmed \u2014 by towering rockets, Mars landers, lunar rocks, Wright brothers planes and lots of lost tourists who thought they were at the White House. They couldn’t figure out why there were satellites hanging from the president’s ceiling. “Look at this!” I told my daughter. “An actual Apollo command module! This thing went into space. See the burn marks from re-entry. See! See! See!” “Eh,” she said. “Now, is the gift shop upstairs or down?” Aaaghhh!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[553,562,8,565],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2015-nutshells","category-childhood","category-parenthoodandchildren","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1367,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366\/revisions\/1367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}