When I was a kid in Connecticut my mother and sister and I dressed up to take the bus from Hamden to New Haven to go to Malley’s, our big city department store. My mother wore her brown and white spectator pumps.

I have no memory of any purchases – maybe a rare something for Easter – but I know the store smelled rich, of perfume and leather. A trip to Malley’s was to drop inside a sophisticated urban world of pretty things and pretty people. To look, to browse, usually not to buy. School clothes more often came from the Montgomery Ward catalog. When our family moved to Pennsylvania our big city store became Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh and The Boston Store in Erie.

My memories were prompted by watching Mr. Selfridge, the Masterpiece Theater series about the man who dramatically transformed the world of shopping when he opened Selfridges department store in London in 1909. For the first time, shoppers of all ranks were invited to touch and try on a world’s fair collection of merchandise, laid out like a tray of bonbons.

Henry Selfridge boldly moved ladies perfume out of the pharmacy department to the store’s entrance, which may be why we still get spritzed walking into some stores today. He created an entire beauty counter with such as Pond’s cream and lipstick, back then favored more by chorus girls than proper ladies.

So far in the TV series I’m unconvinced of the charms of the ego-maniacal Selfridge but I understand the allure of big city department stores.

Shoppers of a certain age probably all have a memory of their big city store, in one of the tallest buildings in town with lavish window displays, white tablecloth tea rooms and elegant ladies’ lounges. Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia. Hudson’s in Detroit. My husband would accompany his mother by streetcar to Hinks in Berkeley and Capwell’s in Oakland .

Many of our grand American stores are long gone, bulldozed and replaced by faceless malls.  Some have survived and remodeled. But the grandness is gone. When I revisited Malley’s in New Haven decades later, it had become a generic store at one end of a downtown mall. It was like it had a lobotomy and didn’t speak to me anymore.

There are vestiges of the old elegance. My friend Jane still seeks out a Neiman Marcus tea room for the nostalgic taste of tiny popovers with strawberry butter and dainty cup of chicken broth.

Mr. Selfridge, and likely Mr. Malley and Mr. Kaufmann, aimed to make shopping a thrilling experience for all. The big city stores that I remember generally aimed at an upper middle class budget, but anyone could say “just looking.”

The first time I went to New York as an adult I wondered how so many New Yorkers could look so chic when certainly they couldn’t all afford to shop at high end stores. A local told me that if you walk through certain stores you can’t help but inhale a sense of style. Then you can take that bargain basement scarf and wear it with pizzazz, a la Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s.

Now the shopping trend is e-commerce. Buy online, save time and money. That’s efficient but it’s more like doing an errand than having an experience.  I prefer a shared day of shopping, with a daughter or best friend, where talk comes easy and the conversation has nothing to do with the sale on cashmere.

For my daughters’ birthdays I give them a shopping trip, usually to San Francisco. It’s as much for me as for them. I get uninterrupted time with them away from grand-kids and jobs. They get a birthday present and lunch. You can’t do that online.

Probably started when I took my baby daughter to Joseph Magnin in San Diego when she was six weeks old. Ah, Joseph Magnin, fondly remembered as JM… now, that was an experience.

We try to teach kids about bullying. There are laws against bullying. No name-calling weeks in schools. We urge children not to be intimidated.

But they shouldn’t look to the grown-ups for role models. Not when it comes to guns. On that matter our leaders pretty much cave before the gun lobby, one of the biggest bullies in Washington.

The supreme bully is the top gun of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, who after the Newtown Connecticut school slaughter called for more guns, rather than fewer guns. And, how about arming all the teachers?

It was such a nutcake idea that had we not all been in shock and in tears we might have laughed him back into his bunker.

But he didn’t go away. He’s still lurking, snarling and growling and saying boo. Along with his lieutenants.

Bullies don’t do it alone. Bullies need backup, in this case a gun lobby goon squad. To threaten and mock. To make people afraid. To argue others into submission. To make people lose their resolve.

In some circles it goes to the very top. Consider the five Republican members of the Senate (Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and James Inhofe) who promise to filibuster additional gun restrictions when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tries to open discussion. It doesn’t matter that the parents of the 20 first graders slaughtered in December want an open debate about guns. The bullies won’t budge.

Bullies rely on bystanders not getting involved. And there are too many bystanders in Congress, including weak-willed Democrats who first said they want to do something about gun control but now worry that the bully might “sight-in” on them.

For the bully to prevail he must create a real or perceived power imbalance. He uses coercion and intimidation to get his way. I got that from a government website designed for teachers and parents to help kids identify, prevent and deal with bullying in the schools. It’s called stopbullying.gov. Among the suggestions is to change the attitude of adults who tolerate bullying. The bully mentality needs to be challenged early or it will become accepted as normal.

Unfortunately the government has no such anti-bullying website for itself.

Bullies count on creating cowards. They make people give in even when they know something is wrong. But there is some reason for hope. There are some people who are standing up. New York, Colorado and Connecticut have enacted new gun control laws. And across the country last week more than 130 groups from Arizona to New Hampshire rallied for common sense gun legislation.

But in Washington, D.C. there’s every reason to fear the bullies will get their way.

So far, the inaction of Congress has created an environment in which “cowards can succeed,” said California congresswoman Jackie Speier who calls her colleagues “gutless” because “they know in their heart of hearts” the right thing to do. “But they are more concerned about their reelection.”

There was great resolve after we buried those first-graders and their teachers. But, so far, common sense, a sympathetic president and the pleas by parents of dead babies don’t seem enough to stand up to the NRA.

Sorry about all this, you 20 first graders. Your country, our leaders and honestly, most of us don’t seem to have the guts. You didn’t even live long enough to hear the lesson on bullying.

When Gabby Giffords took on the NRA she challenged her former colleagues in Congress to do the same, saying, “Be bold. Be courageous.” Only Giffords and those closest to her know how much guts it take for someone whose body, speech and career were forever altered by a bullet to the brain to throw herself into the  nasty debate on gun control and dare her old political pals to be brave like her.

We do not lack for examples of courageous women. And March is a good time to remember a few of them, it being National Women’s History Month and March 8 being International Women’s Day.

Writer philosopher phenomenal woman Maya Angelou holds that, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues. Because without courage,” she said, “you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.”

I think of brave women as those who don’t just go along, who take the tougher route when the easy way  is so well paved.  And these days we need courageous women as much as we ever did, there still being a faction who prefer their women sit down and be quiet.

Here are some recent entries to my Be Brave file:

Eve Ensler – I want to give more kudos to Eve Ensler, the playwright and activist, not just for getting us up and dancing around the world on Valentine’s Day to protest gender violence. But because so much of her hard work has been done while she’s been dealing with stage four cervical cancer. In the middle of chemo and exhaustion and all the dread that goes with cancer she kept bravely fighting the bullies of the world.

Marie Colvin – Called the “uncrowned queen of intrepid journalists,” American reporter Colvin, who wrote for the Sunday Times in London, was killed a year ago while covering the conflict in Syria.  Colvin wore a black eye patch, the result of a grenade injury in Sri Lanka, and often a string of pearls.

Her death and that of other journalists covering the Arab Spring uprisings have sparked an online campaign, A Day Without News, put together by journalists to educate the public on how reporters have become a target of war.

Then there are the topless women in Italy – To protest the notorious misogynist ways of Sylvio Berlesconi, a group of women took off their shirts and scrawled “basta”.. enough.. on their bare skin. The same group, called Femen bared their breasts in Kiev to protest the sex tourist trade, explaining that if they wave banners and march no one notices. But people always pay attention when a bunch of women rip off their tops.

There was some of that bra-shedding nostalgia in Makers, the three hour PBS special about  women’s historic changes the last 50 years, a good reminder of what can be gained when women don’t lose their courage.

Back to today’s bold ones, there should be a special combat award for the military women who are finally calling rape on the officers who routinely sexually abused and humiliated them with impunity. The women’s courage in speaking up, at risk to their career and reputation, may finally force changes in a military justice system which will one day be read as a nasty part of history that took some fearless  women to fix.