Flotsam & Jetsam | Purses

||| FLOTSAM & JETSAM by MAURICE AUSTIN |||

Some three weeks ago, I watched my mother transfer the contents of her “small” purse into the depths of her “large” purse, a process which left me impressed with the capacity of this woman’s ability to plan for every biologic, socio-economic, and nuclear disaster imaginable.

By even several days later, I was less impressed than bemused…and after a few more days, the bemusement became downright frustration.

See, mom is part magician, able to make a hotel key card disappear into her purse between the front desk and the room door not just once, but three times in a row at three subsequent hotels. I withheld my applause, however, because it was I who went back down to the front desk, I who had to explain to the attendant that my mother is part magician…see, she can…oh, you know. I love my mother but fear her purse. 

I’m guessing those were nights two, three, and four on our road trip to visit our Midwest relatives, because the first night (in Kellogg, ID) we both went down to the front desk because her keycard didn’t work. The attendant patiently explained that if the card was put next to an iPhone, the magnetic code would be wiped, and would need to be reprogrammed.

“Okay,” my mother said, putting her freshly-re-programmed key card on top of her cell phone. When we got to the room, it didn’t work. Imagine that.

I apologized profusely to the attendant while he re-programmed another card. When we finally got the room’s door open, where do you think she set her key card?

But it was mostly mom’s purse—that black hole which threatened to entrap all and reveal nothing—which stood as an existential threat to this trip. I made sure the rental vehicle key never got with three feet of that bluish leathery maw.

No surprise, I suppose, that we repeatedly spent several awkward moments on this trip at mom’s assigned hotel room while she fished in her “large” purse for an elusive and dodgy key card, obviously skilled at dodging such enticements as, “Oh, darn it now,” and, “Well for Pete’s sake.” 

The purse is perhaps but a symptom, I’ll admit…I once watched mom lose her car keys between her car and the front door of Mary Mary’s Café, a distance of less than 60 feet. Sometimes magicians require fewer props than others, it seems.

When I stepped into the post office today, there was a gentleman ahead of me (…a PO Box “number neighbor,” apparently) opening his own box, and because of that delay I noticed a purse sitting on the island counter, unattended, perhaps already having devoured its owner in an ultimate act of purse black-hole retribution. Alas, does such a disappearance face us all?

Meh. I pointed…he shrugged…I got the yellow slip from my box and grabbed the purse and took my place behind him in line, feeling half like a responsible citizen (“Look! I’m going to hand this to the clerk!”) and half like a mugger (“Look! He’s got my purse!”)

The line dragged, of course, as slow as mom looking through her…oh, you know. We’re all standing there staring at each other’s posteriors and the corners of the room, none of which are very interesting. 

The first woman to exit through door separating the post office counter had her own purse. Ditto the second. The third had a kind of small Cordura thing more like a camera case, and at this point I admit that I’d shifted into a degree of gender stereotyping that was running much afoul of my comfort zone. The purse suddenly felt heavier, as if I’d taken on an ethical albatross without warning. 

The fourth woman (sundress, no purse) completed her business and stepped through the doors and nodded at the gentleman before me (the “Simms” label on his hat bobbed), obviously acquaintances. 

I held out the purse, and addressed her: “Did you come here with a purse?”

I’m in lead boots, in the deep end, wearing rapidly-deflating water wings, is the thing.

She rolled her eyes, and took her purse, and offered profuse thanks, and here we all are again, on solid ground, looking out for one another. “That was interesting,” a bystander opined. Indeed. Much more interesting than the corners of the room.

And no disappearances on the horizon at all.

“Go for it,,,so true.” —mom