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.

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.

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.