Purseonification
“Rannie, can you get my purse for me?” My mom asks. I am nine years old.
This is my nickname and a request I hear often. It is Saturday morning and time to go downtown for the weekly groceries. I fetch mom’s purse from the front closet, like an obedient Golden Retriever. It’s heavy. My mom opens it and retrieves her shopping list and coupons. I like this particular purse – brown, baggy, leather, and fringed like a country western jacket, drawstrings closing it up around the top.
I wonder what I would put in a purse. All my current purses are souvenirs from aunts and uncles who travel to exotic places like Acapulco or Hawaii. As my mom takes hers everywhere, I think about some part of life in a purse. We climb into our new 1972 Chevy Impala to go downtown.
I am twelve years old.
“Rannie, go get my purse,” my mom says after I’ve told her I need my consent form and fee for my Grade 6 field trip by tomorrow morning. Mom empties the contents of her bag looking for the coin purse so I may have exact change to hand in to my teacher. This particular purse has a never-ending bottom. Like Mary Poppins.
On New Year’s Eve this same year, I proudly parade into The Golden Dragon for my family’s traditional Chinese dinner buffet with my Aloha from Hawaii purse. Aquamarine with an image of two palm trees swaying in the wind next to an ocean. I feel chic. I drink a Shirley Temple. My twelve-year old life contains coins, a roll of butterscotch Lifesavers I got in my Christmas stocking and now, after dinner, the collected paper cookie fortunes of my family.
I am fourteen years old.
“Rannie, can you grab my purse and bring it to me please?” Mom asks from the TV room as I’m in the kitchen doing my homework. My brothers are off to collect door to door for their newspaper deliveries and they need change. I’m trying to get all my homework done before The Carol Burnett Show starts in an hour. I roll my eyes to no one and trudge to the front hall closet, retrieving mom’s container of life.
“Thanks darling,” mom says.
Life organizing again as I watch. I get it. I now regularly carry a purse. It started when my babysitting money turned plentiful enough to warrant a wallet. Having a wallet with my own earnings, I could independently take the Number 5 bus to Midtown Plaza in Saskatoon, meet my friends and go shopping.
I went to Fairweathers to buy my first purse. Macramé like, it had a woven, beige rope exterior, two zippered pockets on the inside, and an exterior zipper to hold my life together. My fourteen old life includes my wallet, Bonne Bell roll-on caramel lip gloss, a strawberry Lip Smacker, a wide tooth comb and Love’s Baby Soft lotion. Life is changing.
Within a year I add more to my purse. A bus pass, my Social Insurance Card, eye shadow, my high school schedule, and Final Net Hair Spray. Bangs were big in the late seventies. I don’t look back. Important lists, cards, notes, reminders, bills, memos, pay stubs, bank books, a passport are all added as time marches on. Purses breathe the life of their owner.
Over the years and now decades later, I have slung, clutched, shouldered, carried, tucked, or packed a myriad of indispensable vessels across my body, on a forearm, in my hand, under an armpit, over a shoulder, or on my back. Purses accessorize us, make a statement, reflect a season, are great deals, too expensive, one of a kind, leather, patent, eel-skin (remember those from the 80s?), pleather, fabric, nylon, plastic, and even scarier oil products. Lucite boxes in the 1950’s? I think they’re back.
Purses are authentic designer, knock offs, small, big, rigid, slouchy, bohemian, travel. They clasp, zip, fold, magnetize, toggle, tie, buckle, button – there are so many ways in and out. As complex as the owner, purses are a true reflection of every one of us. How secure are those contents? I like to think of them as metaphors for the accompanying personal boundaries and personality of its owner. Trusting and wide-open for the world to see, or locked up tight with safe, zippered compartmentalization? Chaotic purse soups, with everything thrown in together in disarray, never finding what is thought to be there, or systematically organized for instantaneous retrieval? The purse, is a fractal or at the least, a likely reflection of our bedrooms and homes.
Purses, bags, everything we carry, connect us around the world, from runways to villages. I have admired beaded, woven, boiled wool, embroidered, and painted pieces – so much exquisite adornment, reflecting both the variety and resourcefulness of artists worldwide. Purses help us celebrate diversity and appreciate utility.
“Oooh, I LOVE your purse,” I’ve overheard randomly.
Strangers become friends in the moment recounting the journey, place, or experience of obtaining the item. Stories, wonderful stories are shared and recommendations are made.
“You need to go to Winners today.”
“Don’t forget to see the leather shop just around the corner from the Duomo in Orvieto.”
“Wait, BC Ferries has the best travel bags!”
Briefcases, satchels, diaper bags, shopping bags, back packs – all these choices chronicle the stages and phases of our life as it evolves. And today, I am proud of all the reusable totes, baskets, and mesh produce bags I show up with at my local markets and grocery stores. A statement piece for the times, connecting and conversing by the cilantro when someone asks where I got those great, mesh vegetable bags.
Purses are beautiful, functional, and sentimental. These adjectives are either our criteria to buy them or excuse to hoard them. At this time of my life, I am divesting more than collecting, and learning how to respectfully say goodbye to my purses. My work colleagues and I collect gently used ones and gather to create Handbags for Hope in our community, an initiative with our local Transition Society, stuffing the bags with essentials, small gifts, words of hope, and love during the holiday season. The meaningfulness of these token items is not lost on us when we understand women, when fleeing abuse, often only take their children and the clothes on their backs. We drink wine in our warm, comfortable homes and reflect on how we need to do more to support the women who show unimaginable strength and courage. Resuscitating these handbags, intentionally breathing life and creating invisible lines of connection and support into these purses for a new owner is a step toward our desire to do more.
I am fifty years old.
“Rannie, can you get my purse for me?” Mom asks.
I go to her front hall closet and find the one mom bought last spring when we went for a day trip to The Bay in Nanaimo. It was medium sized, a coral, orangey red, not a purple red, with beautiful black and white herringbone lining. Couldn’t load it up with too much. Wouldn’t be too heavy to carry. It is Wednesday afternoon and mom retrieves her list of medications she keeps updated, accurate, and organized. She hands it to the ambulance drivers from the stretcher she’s just been helped onto. We never imagined it would be the last item she would retrieve from her purse.
Ten years have passed and my mom’s purse remains untouched, completely intact as it was the day she died. I look through it now and again, and one day it won’t make me cry. It lives in my guest room closet and still breathes life with my mom’s last credit card, notes, lipstick, Kleenex, her volunteer nametag for the Ladies Auxiliary, and her wallet. It is the only piece of my mom’s life we have not deconstructed. We have cleaned out closets, cupboards, under sinks, nightstands, cabinets, dressers, and every nook and cranny of my parent’s life together. Dad has transitioned comfortably to an independent living home, managing the social isolation of losing a spouse.
I take out the purse when I need the comfort of my mom. Most of the time I just hold it and have a moment of reflection. This day, I check on all the items in her purse. I find her Scotch mints. Not the fuzzy, rolling around, collecting all the lint at the bottom of a purse kind. My mom has hers neatly packed in a small, clear plastic zip bag, next to her comb, coupons, and shopping list. I smile at how her hermetically sealed mints perfectly represent her – prepared, archived, and organized.
I close her purse and notice the exterior metal logo for the first time. Ricardo. Beverly Hills. And two swaying palm trees that look identical to my twelve-year old Aloha from Hawaii ones. I hug her purse as it exhales her life, still connecting to mine.