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.

It’s no surprise that young adults increasingly support gay marriage and think it’s just fine for two moms to have kids.  Young people grew up with gay friends. They may have a gay stepbrother or a lesbian minister.

But the part that’s bothered me all along in the debate over marriage equality is why older people are assumed to be against same sex unions. When old people were young people they too had gay friends and most likely a gay relative, teacher or neighbor, but they either didn’t know it, refused to accept it or were part of keeping it a secret.

But since then have come decades of changes in societal thinking and real life experiences. It baffles me how you can get to be 60, 70, 80 or whatever age one is considered an old person and not revise some of your thinking, too.   One advantage to living a long life is to have participated in a great span of human history and to evolve with it.

It’s called wisdom, one of the promised perks of old age. And if you’re anywhere near old you’ve experienced some pretty amazing advances in gay equality.  There are now six openly gay and lesbian members in the House of Representatives and the first open homosexual in the U.S. Senate. The wedding pages of the New York Times and other papers routinely include same sex nuptials. Who didn’t weep watching Brokeback Mountain? Who doesn’t love Ellen?

Yet, the gay lifestyle has an image of being flat-out resisted by the older generation.

But look at this. As the Supreme Court took on same sex marriage,  opinion polls reported that approval of gay marriage has increased over the last 10 years in all generations. Including boomers and older.

There are several reasons why opponents switched their thinking, say researchers for the Pew opinion poll. First big reason is personal connection. You have friends or family who are gay and  lesbian, not strangers whose lifestyle you don’t get but people you love and respect.

The second reason people gave for reconsidering their opposition was they became more aware, studied the issue and grew older.

There it is. Pollsters didn’t say which age group attributed their change of heart on getting older, but the hope is that the longer we live the more we learn. The more kinds of people we get to know.  Differences disappear. The heart opens. They become us.

Anyone who is 65 today and defends his prejudice on what the church and Readers Digest told him as a kid gave up on life as a learning process.

As for me,  I prefer to think of my brain still expanding, not shrinking to fit what most people thought in the 1950s in rural Pennsylvania.

Don’t lump me in your stuck generation.

As an older person I know many things can threaten my happy heterosexual home. But it’s not the two fathers living down the street.

And the claim that every child needs a mother and a father? Well, biologically speaking that’s true. But in my experience it seems that what children need once they’re in the world are parents who love them and love each other. Who will keep them safe, make sure they eat their greens, go to their basketball games and teach them to be kind and brave and think for themselves.

To worry about same sex marriage redefining family doesn’t wash either. We long-time straights redefine family when we remarry, become step parents and give the grandchildren four sets of grandparents.

If you have been on this earth a while and have been paying attention, it seems pretty obvious that opposite sex couples are no better at loving and parenting than same sex couples. Or visa-versa.