Zola Understood Our Lust for Shopping

The most fun I ever had spending money was during a shopping spree at a toy store. It was almost Hanukkah, which falls near my birthday, and my parents asked me what they should get me for both occasions. I told them I didn’t want them to pick things out for me, I wanted to pick things out for myself. I wanted to enact what I had seen on TV: children running gleefully through Toys R Us, grabbing this and that off the shelves. My parents were put out by the request: because it took place not on my sixth birthday, or my tenth, but rather my eighteenth.