Bag Lady

I've never been one of those women who were crazy about shoes.  Probably because I have the fattest feet ever, so that even when my body is at its slimmest, I still have to shop for my feet in the plus size department.  When I was a little girl, my mother took me to a special shoe store that carried shoes in widths up to triple-E, and on occasion they would special order a quadruple -E just for my fat little feet.  I feel like I've been wearing old-lady shoes since I was five.  They don't make really cute shoes in quadruple -E. All this to say that I sublimated shoe love into purse love.  There was a time when I owned not one, not two, but seven Coach purses.  I had a leather one in every color (brown, cordovan, navy , white, off-white, cream, and black).  Then a few years ago, Coach stopped making leather purses - now all their bags are some canvas like material and they have these strange geometric patterns on them.  I was extremely disappointed by this.  These bags are very unappealing to me, and certainly do not live up to the standard of classic fashion that I had come to expect from my years of loyalty to the Coach brand.

So, I moved on.  I got into Brighton bags for a while, but was never totally in love with them.  I did like their accessories - the watches, bracelets, and earrings are very nice.   I still wander through the Brighton store at Southwest Florida airport and look longingly at the luggage, especially the bright red pieces.  Very fun.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine got a Tiganello bag in butter yellow.  The leather was extremely soft and supple, and she looked just darling carrying it on her shoulder.  I coveted it for a while, and when it went on sale at Macy's, I bought it. After a few days of carrying it on my shoulder, I was bent sideways - the thing weighed a ton.  I took out everything that wasn't absolutely necessary (meaning an emergency sewing kit and a teabag) and it still felt like hauling a sack of potatoes around.

For a while I was totally into little purses in every color.  I had purses to match every outfit, and some that matched no outfits just for fun.  I had a red purse one winter, and an olive green purse when they were cool.  I had the yellow purse for spring, and a burnt orange purse for fall.  My friends started calling me the rainbow purse girl.

Last year I gave up on purses.   I still carry one - but the operative word is one.  I've limited myself to one bag per season, instead of having a bag for every outfit.  Plus, I've become extremely picky about the type of bag it is.  It has to have a short shoulder strap, and contain only one inner compartment.  It must have a zipper pocket on the outside, and a cell phone pocket on the inside.   I have become an absolute fussbudget about my purse.

I am amazed at how much time I save in the morning, now that I no longer have to shift the contents of my purse from one to another.  Many mornings I was rushing to dump the wallet, the pocket calendar, the pill container, the ipod, the lip gloss, the reading glasses, the notepad, the breath mints,  the phone (dear God, don't forget the phone), and the office keys (just in case I need to lock up), from one bag into another just minutes before dashing out the door.  Now it's all in one purse, and it stays there through the entirety of one major season.

I feel bad about my purses, though.  I still have a closet full of them.  The cute little brown one with the bow on it.  The purple leather clutch.  A turquoise bag that exactly matched a sweater, jacket, and watch.  The nice thing about purses was that they didn't need to be a size.  It made no difference whether my feet were fat, or my belly was bloated, or my hips a little too wide.  A purse always looked good, and it didn't even matter what day of the month it was.

But one thing I've noticed about getting older - I don't care about all that so much any more.  I'd rather have the extra time spent changing purses each morning to sleep, or drink another cup of coffee, or scratch my dog behind his ears.

After all, I've been wearing frumpy shoes all my life, and my mother taught me that your purse and shoes should always match.

 

And the Word Is...

Yesterday I wrote about our church's Star Sunday tradition, and how eagerly I  was anticipating choosing my word for 2011.  Over the past ten years, here are some of the other words I've chosen at random from the large stack of stars, layered face down in the offering plate:

  • Music (twice!)
  • Stories
  • Reading
  • Imagination
  • Practice

Today's word - letters - comes on the wake of this entry in my writing journal on December 31, 2010, as  I thought about the popularity of memoir writing, and contemplated writing out some of my own life story:

Gone are the days when people wrote letters in longhand, and saved their correspondence so at some point in the future their children and their children's children could read them.  Have memoirs become the letters of the future?  Our letters to the world about who we were, how we became the person we did, why we matter?

Letters have actually been on my mind for the past several weeks, and I started thinking about them when a fellow writer/blogger posted a Tweet to the effect that she was longing to get a handwritten letter in the mail.  It made me remember the days when Jim and I corresponded by hand on a daily basis - he was in college (all of 35 miles away!) and we faithfully wrote each other long epistles every single day.  Both sets of letters are in boxes in our basement, ordered chronologically (from September 1973 to January 1974).  They serve as a tangible reminder of a particular period in our lives, and it may be that one day our children (or our children's children) will read them and feel a tug of recognition in their hearts.

For a moment, I wondered why the word "letters" would appear in our Star Sunday collection.  But then I realized that letters were hugely important in the literary canon of the Christian church. The New Testament includes fourteen of Paul's epistles to the various towns and cities he visited, as well as seven other general epistles by other disciples such as James, Jude, and Peter.  These letters were crucial in keeping the new Christians informed about the progress of the faith, and reminding them to remain steadfast in their beliefs after the apostles had left their cities.

Letters have also played a huge part in literary relationships and history over the course of generations.  The correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West comes to mind, as does Emily Dickinson's epistolary romance with Thomas Higginson.

I've been musing about what this word means for me, a woman in the 21st century who dabbles in writing and uses the internet to tell her stories.  I no longer write "letters" in the ordinary use of the word.  But I wonder if my writing here can become a modern day epistle - a chronicle of life in general and my own in particular that stands over time and allows the world to know who I am, how I became the person I did, and why I matter.

Because we all matter in this great cosmic scheme of life, we all have a star to follow.

May yours shine brightly and illuminate your way.

The Word

One of the annual New Year's customs in the blogging world is choosing  a word for the year ahead.  People choose their words for all kinds of reasons - it could be something they hope will happen, a trait they'd like to adopt, a principle of life they wish to espouse. Whatever  word they choose, it's meant to be a harbinger of positive change in their life during the 12 months ahead of them. Following a Twitter link this morning led me to Ali Edwards blog and her Word Project.  She posted a list of alllll the words that bloggers have chosen as "one little word" for 2011, as wall as a link to the words being spoken aloud, resulting in a very beautiful litany of aspiration.

I've been itching to choose a word for myself this year, but I'm waiting until after tomorrow, which is Star Sunday.  I've written about this event before.  It's the way our church honors Epiphany each year, with the annual gift of stars.  The offering plates are passed through the congregation, each plate filled to the brim with paper stars piled face down.  Upon the face of each star is written a WORD - words like hope, health, prayer, creativity, practice, leadership, attention, music, stories, love, redemption, relationship, and hundreds of others.  Each person chooses a star in faith that this word will manifest itself for good in their life during the coming year.

I absolutely adore Star Sunday, and I'm not alone.  You have to get there early, because parking spots are hard to come by.  There are usually more people in the congregation than on any other day, with the possible exception of Easter Sunday (and maybe not even then!)  Our minister jokes that it's because Star Sunday is the only day you get to take something out of the offering plate, rather than put something in.

But that's not it.  It's the idea of being given something that just might change you or change your life, something that might give you the added incentive to work harder at being kind and loving, to pay more attention to people in your life, to cultivate a hidden talent.  It's the remarkable notion that God, or whatever higher power you believe in, can direct you to a word that may have meaning for you and you alone.

As a writer, I also love Star Sunday because it's a day when everyone acknowledges the power of words.  All of us are there for the same reason - because we want a WORD, one little WORD.  With our desire, we invest that word with all kinds of power.  Of course, those of us who write (and read) know that words have immense power.  It's just very cool for me to see all the people in my church suddenly announcing that they believe that too.

So I'll be back tomorrow to tell you about my word for 2011, and to see what star I'm steering by.

 

 

Just Like the Good Old Days

For the past couple of days, the alarm clock has gone off extremely early, and my husband has dragged himself out of bed, into the shower, and off to the office before the sun even had a chance to peek through the clouds.  Last night at 6:00 p.m., I got a text message saying he'd probably be working for another 30-40 minutes.  At 7:30 he texted  to say he'd just left the office. Hmm..."Just like the good old days," I texted back.

For the first 30 years of our marriage, my husband worked long, long hours.  As a newlywed I found this quite difficult. The first summer after we were married, he worked seven days a week, 10-12 hours per day.  I was lonely.  I sat on the floor in our bedroom and cried a lot.

His heavy work schedule continued, and started to include traveling for days, weeks, even months at a time.  First it was to places like Newark, New Jersey, or Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Then he was sent to England, and China.  I was a young mother by then, and being alone with a baby and toddler was scary and lonely.  I walked the floor carrying the baby and cried a lot.

But then Brian got older and became more independent.  I made some new friends and started working part time myself.  I became accustomed to having the house to myself, to eating meals when I felt like it, to watching whatever I wanted on television.  I was still lonely sometimes, but I wasn't crying about it anymore.

By the time our nest was empty, I was working more and had lots of friends and activities. Jim got a different job, and worked normal hours.  With internet capabilities, he was able to telecommute, and had a much more flexible schedule, giving us the ability to travel more and spend more time together.  I wasn't lonely at all, and never needed to cry.

July 2009.  The manufacturing sector of the economy imploded.  What had been a flexible schedule turned into no schedule at all when he lost his job.  He was home every day, all day long.  Naturally he was depressed and angry, he felt lost and unsure where to turn.  We  both cried - a lot.

It was a big change having him home all the time, and it wasn't always for the better.  I'm sure any of you with retired spouses can attest to this.  There is definitely a learning curve involved.  It seemed like we were always tripping over one another - literally, and figuratively.  I like a quiet house, but everything he does seemed to require some kind of accompanying noise-either television, or music.  I like to do all the house cleaning at once, but he hated the smell of all the cleaning fluid, so I tried to divide it into small sessions, one room at a time.  Our dining room became the "home office," and so any work he was doing was smack dab in the middle of the house, which severely curtailed my ability to play the piano, or mess around in the kitchen, or even have a game of fetch with the dogs.

I admit it - I yearned to have my house/life back.  On the rare occasions when he would go out without me, I found myself running to the piano to play for an hour,  scrub the countertops with bleach.  Being with your spouse 24/7 after years of being mostly apart is something akin to the feelings we occasionally have about our children.  We love them.  But we hate them.  But we love them.

Things in his corner of the business world have steadily improved in the last few months, and now he's suddenly finding himself with more than enough contract work to keep busy.  There are a plethora of opportunities on several fronts. His phone is ringing.  He has meetings to attend and projects to manage.  He's a happy camper.

But I'm suddenly feeling a little lonely.  I think I'd grown accustomed to the idiosyncrasies and inconveniences, and found they were outweighed by the companionship and camaraderie.  I liked taking walks together in the morning, and then going out for coffee.  I enjoyed meeting for lunch at the last minute.  I felt comforted knowing he was available if I needed a hand.   And I loved being able to count on having dinner together at regular time.

Life is perverse, isn't it?  As the song goes, "we don't know what we've got 'til it's gone."  Now that things are feeling more and more like the old days, I'm thinking there were some pretty good days during the past year after all.