Resolution For 2011: How I Hope to Heal Galactic Disharmony and Locate My Car Keys
By Robin Ford Wallace
My sister Laura has a theory that if you find the perfect purse, the rest of your life will fall into order behind it. Of course, it’s purely hypothetical because no one has ever done it.
If you have a small purse, you find yourself in denial about it, trying to cram in things like books and pizzas. If you have a big one, you can fit all those necessities in there but with the caveat you’ll never see them again. And if you get one with six zillion separate compartments cleverly cordoned off with flaps and zippers and outside pouches, you will almost certainly end up slobbering mad on a rooftop with an Uzi, firing into an innocent crowd while you shriek, “Where – are – my – Breathsavers?”
But why are we talking about purses in this, a feature that usually maintains a least a thin veneer of horticulture?
One word: January. January is not a month that offers much by way of horticulture, but it is one that traditionally affords humanity an opportunity for self-improvement as it slouches into the new year appalled by what a loser it’s been in the old one. For my resolution this year, I thought I’d try the purse theory.
Some people don’t believe in these self-improvement resolutions. That’s fine for them, but as for those of us whose personality is best described not as Type A or Type B but Type TW (“Train Wreck”), we have to believe. It is our only hope!
It’s not just that we have a million faults. It’s also that we’re so aware of them, our insecurity is fault no. 1,000,001. Here, for example, is an actual conversation one of us, to name no names, had with her husband after hosting a dinner:
HER: Honey? Do you think I’m an OK cook?
HIM (drowsily): You’re an excellent cook. Everything was delicious.
HER: Well. Thanks. But my writing –
HIM: There’s nothing wrong with your writing. Go to sleep.
(Pause.)
HER: What about my hair?
Disgusted, he left her for a Waffle House waitress.
Not really, but you see the problem: For those of us with low-to-no self-esteem, if we don’t have at least the hope of improvement we don’t know how much longer we can stand us.
Besides, though I admit each year’s diet and budget may leave me just as fat and poor by Christmas as I was the year before, there really are some resolutions I have kept. In 2009, I kept one to stop smoking, and in 2010 (squeaking by in month 12 by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin) I kept another, overcoming my Internet ignorance enough to plunge boldly into cyberspace. Bob’s Little Acre is now a blog you may read at www.bobslittleacre.blogspot.com.
Now, for 2011, it seems logical to give the purse theory a try because my handbag has always seemed such an apt metaphor for my life. Which is to say: a train wreck.
I’m the large purse type, myself. I’m always saying in this space that things don’t matter, things are nothing, and I really believe that. Nonetheless, insofar as I own things, I don’t leave home without them.
My purse must house the accoutrements of my trade – notebook, voice recorder, camera – as well as books and crosswords to keep me company at lunch, in case my car breaks down, or in the event I’m thrown in jail.
Then there are cosmetics. A girl has to have lipstick, not so much from vanity as from the fact a girl’s lips start drying out once a girl hits menopause or so. And the mirror compact is not for primping but to check whether, as indicated from the looks I get from interviewees sometimes, I really have a booger hanging from my nose, or have recently turned into a cockroach.
As for the rest of it – well, heck, you never know when you’re going to need a corkscrew, or want to toss a salad. It may seem like a lot to carry around, but when someone needs something out of the ordinary like a jump rope or a shoehorn, we big-purse types can look smug, pick up our bag and –
Claw helplessly through it until we are reduced to tears. We can never find anything in those murky depths! Objects in a big purse do not obey ordinary laws of physics. They move through time rather than space – there, not there, then there again with no intervening human agency.
Purse contents not only move mysteriously through the fabric of reality, sometimes they even multiply. This happened once with my favorite pen. I liked it so much I always kept mining in there until I found it. Then one day my hand came out of the dark miasma clasping two of them. It was a shocker, like learning you are married to twins.
Of course, the duplicate pen soon returned to its alternate universe, and so did the original eventually, never to return. It’s when that happens, says Laura, that action is required. “When your space-time continuum goes south,” she says, “it’s time for a new purse.”
It’s time for a new purse. Maybe this time it really will be the perfect one, and then, who knows? Maybe Laura’s theory will work. Maybe I’ll stop fumbling frenziedly for my cell phone until a ringing from my butt alerts me it’s in my back pocket. And maybe from there I’ll become calm and organized and quietly self-confident.
And maybe from there reality will continue to reshape itself until the clashing universes achieve harmony. Maybe all the people of the world will live together in peace and love each other like brothers.
Now. What about my hair?
END
Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.
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