It's in the bag.

My mom's purse that I remember the best was the white one that looked like a basket.  It had a gold clasp and I used to like to turn it and pull the top part off of the bottom part.  They would only come apart when they were lined up perfectly.  Then the two pieces would flop back and the bag would be open.  The lining was blue fabric with little white flowers on it.  It wasn't attached at the bottom, so you could turn it inside-out and really get it clean.  That's the only time I'd see the one red flower that my mom said  had been colored in by an uncapped, red felt-tipped pen. I loved the artistic accident.

She kept her purses in the sweater closet.  It was half-filled with handknit sweaters and half-filled with purses, but it was still only named the sweater closet.  The "changing of the purses" (as my brothers and I called the process of emptying the contents of, for example, the brown vinyl one that looked like a bowling bag into the red corduroy one with chain handles) usually took a little while.  If it was REALLY time to get out of the house, she wouldn't make the change.  It always involved emptying the unwanted junk from the bottom of the purse that had been stashed in the closet, and then refilling it with only the essentials from the one currently in use.  What this meant was that the one being retired  to the closet would be tucked away with all of the unwanted stuff that didn't make the transfer.  And then, when she wanted that purse again, it had to be emptied for the next change.  I always wondered why she didn't just throw the junk out in the first transfer, but she never did.  It wasn't until the next time that she had the courage to part with the paperclips, safety pins, gritty pennies, kleenex with pink lipstick blots and leaky red pens.

Before my trip to Ecuador last week I did a "changing of the wallets."  The stuff that got changed?  An Italian stamp, the 5k race times of my Ethiopian friends scribbled on a six and a half year old tiny sheet of paper now as soft as kleenex, two rupees and a fortune which read, "Get your mind set....confidence will lead you on." (I HAD TO transfer that!  Pulling it out of the tiny inner pocket of the wallet was like pulling it out of a cookie again. Only this time, I swore I was going to live it). 

And today, as I finally accepted the fact that the straw summer bags should be tucked away and the leather ones pulled to the front, I had a "changing of the bags."  Unlike my mother (and my practices with my wallet) I always empty my bags before they're stashed.  The thought of finding the chewed gum wadded up in a napkin or a couple of stray Sugar Babies with sand and hair stuck to them has been enough to keep me emptying!  The only problem is, this prevents surprises.  Unless, of course, you have a bag with 8 diffferent pockets and compartments.  And that's the one I had with me at the restaurant tonight when I was madly searching for a pen. 

I knew I hadn't put one in the bag this morning, but I was sure that there must have been one that was overlooked in last year's emptying frenzy.  Nope.  No pen.  But, I discovered a treat in  the inside back pocket with the smaller zipped pocket inside that one.  I found a clipping from the New York Times of February 2005.  It was an article about Paris with a photo of the carousel on Place des Abbesses. Someone had given it to me before I ran the 2005 Paris Marathon.  It didn't mean anything to me at the time.  I was going to Paris to run a marathon, not ride a carousel.  But for some reason, it got stashed in the bag and never emptied.  And there it was today to remind me that in 2005 I'd had no idea that I'd be living in Paris in 2010 and take my own photo of the carousel in Place des Abbesses.

So, as I struggle with decisions of just what to do with my life in 2011, who knows what I might have absentmindedly stashed away to be discovered in 2016.  Maybe I'd better go back to the trash can and dig out the instruction manual for my new camera lense and the brochure for the fall session of writing classes at Newberry Library.  Wouldn't it be fun to discover those in the bottom of a bag in 5 years and be able to smile?  And why does the fortune stay with the stuff that gets transferred instead of the stuff that gets emptied?  What's it going to take to make me believe in that one little cookie from 1999?