One of the things I love about our neighborhood is that there are children here. Lots and lots of them, of every size and attitude. Shoals of them, migrating herds of them, like the wildebeest on the Serengeti.
If you walk down Via Garibaldi at around 6 on a summer evening, you will realize that this is one corner of Italy in which the word “birthrate” isn’t associated with “falling.”
But an unusually perceptive person would already have known all that from the scene I noticed outside one of the tobacco/candy/lottery ticket/toy stores here.
What these three alarmingly pink doll-size strollers reveal is:
- That there are little girls living nearby.
- That there are lots of them, enough to create an important market for toys, especially those designed for little girls, a market that requires serious inventory.
- That they are extremely demanding customers, who require choice in the products they insist their relatives buy them, whichever relative has recently shown a weak spot that can be exploited.
- That any color is good, as long as it’s pink.
I hope I’m here when they grow up, I really want to see how they dress.
2 Comments
Oh, my dear. I do love reading about your neighborhood. I remember all the children out in Via Garibaldi in the evening – it was almost hazardous, but so much fun.
The only thing more hazardous than the kids are their parents (more on that later) — no, I mean the kids on bikes. And skates, and skateboards, and pushing and pulling things, like their dogs or their siblings. They get extra points for doing both simultaneously.