Southern Girls, Packed and Loaded

I have a lot of stuff; some of it is special, often useful, and downright necessary for my making it through the day. I find it necessary to take stuff with me wherever I go, conventional wisdom being that I cannot be parted from some of my stuff for extended periods of time. It is what defines me as a useful person in this world. I have a select amount of my stuff with me at all times; after all I might need it. Someone else might need to use my stuff, borrow my stuff for a brief time, or take from me my stuff and even profit from the fact that I have my stuff with me.

In order to carry my stuff, I need something to put it in to transport it from place to place as I go through the day. I could in all honesty just carry my stuff around in a paper bag or maybe a plastic bag if it is raining, but then it would only be a pile of useful stuff with no organization to it. Since women are more resourceful than just sticking stuff in a bag, we have a carrier that expresses our personality, makes a fashion statement, has pockets and zippers, and helps us to lose things inside of it that we didn’t even know we owned. And we as women have become more skilled at using this carrier for “toting stuff to and fro.”

Of course I am referring to the purse, or handbag, or as my Grandma would have said, my pocketbook. She never went anywhere without her pocketbook, and although I never saw her retrieve anything from it, she too felt that she always needed certain stuff with her. I began an obsessive attachment to the purse at a very young age. When I was about 3 years old, I had the mumps. There is a picture of me — fat cheeks and all — holding up two little plastic purses, one in each hand, and smiling at the camera. Black and white photo because color had not been invented yet. Seems like I inherited the pocketbook gene – like my grandma — because I too developed the habit of always having a purse with me.

Purses, by their very nature, are expressions of who we are. You may not always tell a book by its cover, but you can tell a woman by her purse. Large or small, leather or cloth, covered with floral designs or sequins, you can express yourself with your purse. There are many stages in my purse evolution starting with a period when I thought that you only needed one purse at a time. If you bought a “good” one (i.e. expensive), it would last for several years. Then I went through a phase that I believed the more the better, change the purse as often as you change the outfit, it must all match. This presented two problems. With many purses to buy, the quality was sacrificed – they did not last long, a strap would break, a zipper wouldn’t zip, or the doodads, once attractive, would fall off into doodad land. The second problem was that I was constantly changing my stuff from one bag to another, leaving out essential pieces of stuff that I needed.

For a short time, it became taboo to carry a purse because I heard a friend say that engineers should not carry purses. Being an engineer (as well as gullible), I adopted this line of thinking and for several hours, I did not carry a purse. It got rather difficult to transport my most essential stuff, so the purse toting soon re-emerged. I reasoned that a small purse might be acceptable for a female engineer, so I started carrying teeny-tiny purses, so small that I couldn’t even put my car keys in them. This phase lasted until the advent of cell phones when I realized that there was no way the keys and the phone was going in there at the same time. Size consideration became dominant and along with size came numerous pockets, inside and out, one for keys, another for the phone and others for lipstick, sunglasses, receipts. At one time I had a purse with so many pockets on the outside, the inside was unnecessary.

All of this discussion leads to the status of the purse in my life today. I have often felt that a purse could change my life, make me more organized and that in turn would lead me to more accomplishments in my life. If my stuff was carried around in the perfect container, I could just imagine the wonderful things I could do. I would know where my keys were at all times, if I needed an antacid tablet, it would be there, and if I needed a light, I would have a mini flashlight. Raining? Ah there’s an umbrella. There’s a gun in there too, I’m sure. All those daily needs would be satisfied, including lunch – it’s in there somewhere -because I had the perfect purse, packed and loaded. I have never had the perfect thing to carry my stuff with me daily and I may be seen packing and loading several bags each morning. I must be a double bagger.