Do you enjoy shopping? Especially for clothes?

How you answer the question may depend on which side of the gender fence you are on. I have not conducted formal surveys on the subject, but among the gloried differences between men and women, the attitude toward shopping must rank near the top. Men view shopping (and buying) as a business transaction. Women (most women—there may be exceptions) consider shopping as a sacred mission and buying as only incidental to the shopping experience itself.

Lacking scientific evidence, I will use myself as an example where men are concerned. Let's say I need a couple of new shirts. I go to a men's clothing store and say, "I want to see some shirts."

The salesperson directs me to the shirt rack.

"I'll take this one, and that one there," I say, walk to the sales counter, pay the clerk, gather up my shirts and drive home. The entire transaction takes maybe five minutes. Ten minutes, tops.

It's altogether different when a woman goes shopping for a shirt. First, she looks at every shirt in the store and tries on at least half of them, even those she knows she won't like, before she gets anywhere close to making a purchase. I have bought new herd sires in less time than it takes an average woman to buy a blouse.

Early in our married life, my wife and I practiced togetherness in most things, including clothes shopping. I would accompany her to the mall, browsing first one store and then the next, where she examined garments as if she worked for the Consumer Product Safety Division. She would spend hours looking at and trying on clothes, and wind up buying a pair of anklets.

For awhile, this was sort of entertaining, but it was also tiring. Shopping, the way my wife did it, was hard work. So, I adopted the practice of buying a magazine, finding a comfortable bench in the mall atrium and reading while she shopped. She stopped by my bench now and then to keep me posted.

"I found this neat pantsuit in Penney's," she'd tell me. "It's exactly the shade of blue I've been looking for, and just my size."I noticed that she was not carrying any packages."Where is it?" I asked.

"Oh, I'm not buying it today; I want to think it over," she would say. "They may mark it down in a week or two."It occurred to me that they also may mark it up, or that some other customer might buy the garment in a week or two, but I never said anything. She was having so much fun, I didn't want a discouraging word to rain on her party.

Our daughter seems to have inherited shopping traits from both her mother and me. Like me, she doesn't shop very often. But, when she does, like her mother, she tries on every garment she can tote to the dressing room. And, she buys. My daughter shops at a clip of about $100 per hour, with gusts up to $250.

Now, here we are on the approach to that season when everybody buys gifts for everybody else. But in recent years, I have given up trying to guess what people might buy for themselves, let alone hope that I might be able to find it. Instead, I stick to money as Christmas and birthday gifts. I know: giving money is kind of low-brow and insensitive and indicates that I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about how to come up with that just-right present.

But so far, I haven't had anyone give it back. After all, money is so easily exchanged.