HEART BEAT: Want Not, Waste Not

By Felicia Mitchell

When I think about conspicuous consumption, I think about my pocketbooks. I have too many.  I also have multiple bags working at one time.

For example, I have my knitting purse, a huge bag that calls to mind Mary Poppins.  I love this bag, and my mother loves this bag.  I can tuck all kinds of things in it, from yarn to a thermos of tea to all kinds of odds and ends, including my mother’s favorite magazine.

Then there’s the fanny pack I bought at a VA hospital years ago when I took my father in for an appointment.  Who goes to a VA hospital and comes away with a new purse-like appendage?  Well, I guess I do.  I regularly use this fanny pack.  You’d think that would be enough, that and the huge knitting bag.

Not really.  I also need a tote to function as a briefcase, a knapsack for hiking, and a hand purse to keep all my stuff in.  Sometimes I carry a plain little bag, the smaller the better, for sundry things a person wants to carry.  Other times I carry something bigger, something yellow or something brown.  Lest we forget, there’s the laptop bag.

The only thing I can figure about why my life is spread out in so many purses and totes is that I am trying to keep it together, “it” meaning my fragmented, cluttered life.  At the same time, I suspect that Dr. Freud would say that (a) I’m trying to recapture that moment when I got my first purse for my second birthday or (b) I’m chasing some elusive butterfly.

It’s a memory that remains vivid, the memory of the birthday party where I received a tiny white purse that contained a penny.  Five years later, my parents drove me to a dime store to pick out a new purse to replace this tiny one.  I sat in the car while they brought two for me to look at:  a practical, roomy wicker purse designed for a child and a black patent leather clutch designed for a woman who wears red lipstick.

I picked the patent leather purse and carried it with me almost everywhere I went until I went off to junior high school and noticed that other girls, popular girls, carried leather John Romaine bags.  In my homemade dresses and bargain basement shoes, I thought that if I carried the right purse, I would blend right in.  Although I couldn’t afford the right purse then, I bought too many others after that.

I could buy a John Romain purse today on Ebay.  With the economy the state it is in, why bother?  The economy makes me feel more frivolous than ever about my purses. Sure, I could have lost the money I spent on them in the stock market, or I could have tucked it away for a rainy day. 

That’s what I’ll do the next time another purse tempts me.  Save my money for a rainy day.