The Red Purse

Deprivation will distort almost anyone's world view. I remember reading an account once by the son of a man who had survived the Nazi concentration camps. In his later years, the father left the gas ring burning constantly in his kitchen, rather than relight it as needed. When questioned about this dangerous practice, the father replied that the gas was included in his rent and was free no matter how much he used, but he had to pay for matches.

Many of us know people who lived through the Depression and the cumulative wars, and have observed an economy in them that seems, in light of our present surplus, eccentric if not bordering on the bizarre. I remember as a child having long arguments with my parents who promised me I'd be sorry, one day in the future, that I didn't have the bread (or, whatever) I was wasting today.

No matter how many times I tried to explain food shortage as a distribution problem and that perishables do not keep indefinitely even with the best intentions of conserving for leaner times, I never had any success in moving them to a more balanced view. Even when things were free, like windfall apples or discarded furniture, they were committed to parsing out the apples and preserving the broken chairs. Their hyper-frugality took on some odd forms.

Tinsel was painstakingly removed from the tree, and carefully placed in the original package, to be used year after year after year. When I inherited the Christmas decorations, I couldn't help but pause to appreciate the vintage wrinkled tinsel that had been pressed into decorative service for so long. And then, in the typically wasteful manner that ungrateful children of my generation who never knew a time when tinsel was not plentiful and was only available to rich people, I threw it out.

In my father's workshop were many boxes holding an odd array of assorted things that could be useful during the next Depression. One box held bits of broken glass. Another box was full of crooked nails. Yet another box contained a collection of seat belts from forty, or so, years of automobile ownership - he didn't believe in leaving the seat belts in any car he owned, but couldn't bear to actually discard them.

In fact, the boxes themselves were an act of hoarding. We lived down the street from a chicken joint, and the carcasses were delivered, frozen, in very high quality, waxed corrugated cardboard boxes with lids. My dad visited the alley behind the restaurant almost every day, for the mere pleasure of surplus box acquisition.

My mother, Elsa, had her own obsessive system of economy that manifested in numerous ways. Not the least of which was her conservation of underwear. By carefully cannibalizing bits and scraps from a worn out pair, she could either build a whole new pair of underpants or extend the life of a pair teetering on the edge. Elsa would replace the elastic if it was sprung; if the underwear had holes, she would patch them or replace a front or back; if the underwear was beyond mending, but the elastic was still good, she would rip it out and roll it into tiny bundles.

The bundles would be saved for...well...forever, I guess...stockpiled in a drawer against the day when economic disaster struck and elastic for underwear was not available anywhere for love or money. (Understand that a pair of cotton underpants in the 60s ran about thirty cents a pair for children and less than a dollar for an adult woman.)

But, the full demonstration of her poverty anxieties came out around food. She once told me that Germans of her generation would not go so far as to offer a guest a glass of water, and she couldn't believe the generosity of Americans with their pot-lucks and picnics and barbeques and invitations to restaurants. I don't know whether she just had incredibly stingy friends and relatives, or if extreme deprivation kills an impulse to share food. But Elsa's happiest moments were in the presence of a free buffet, not because she was greedy, but because the surplus of food seemed to reassure her psychologically in a way that I cannot comprehend.

My enduring memory of this took place when I was in college. My department was having a small awards ceremony, and had provided a table of appetizers and drinks for students and their families. I was alert to this, and reminded my mother that it wasn't polite to storm the snacks before the Saran Wrap was even peeled away from the vegetable tray. She was grasping her miniature paper plate and had her plastic fork upheld in the "spearing position" and I was doing everything but hold her back by her collar. Finally, the department chair invited the guests to help themselves to refreshments, and she was out of her chair like a shot.

Now, on the table nestled in a paper doily and surrounded by a fanned assortment of crackers, sat an impressive cheese ball. You know...the kind made out of some sort of processed cheese-food (whatever "cheese-food" is, implying that it is not cheese, but a comestible created to give the impression of being cheese) and then rolled in nuts (or a "nut-food"). The purpose of a cheese-ball is to provide a spread for the crackers, and this one was impressive...maybe eight inches in diameter, meant to satisfy the processed cheese needs of thirty people, or so.

Being first in line, Elsa laid claim to the cheese-ball. To my horror, she managed to impale the whole thing on her fork and was carrying it off to feast in a remote corner before I intercepted her. "Put...it...back," I hissed in her ear between clenched teeth. "There...is...only...one." She glared at me, hostile and resistant. "But I am first," she hissed back. Asserting, I guess, that the early German gets the cheese-ball.

We scuffled, but I prevailed and managed to get the yellow orb back to the buffet unharmed.

This was a dance we did many, many times over the years - her will conflicting with my desperate desire to maintain order in an orderly world. A world where, as sure as night follows day, another cheese-ball would always be sitting in the refrigerated case at the market, waiting for me, if ever I needed one. This struggle was enacted on many fronts - clothing, transportation, medical care, hygiene products...you name it. We fought over the use of shampoo ("Do you really need to wash your hair so often?" "Yes, I do.") We fought over the expense of a store-bought swim suit when she could sew one for so much less out of knit material salvaged from an old dress. We fought when she insisted on wearing her old eyeglasses so that her new eyeglasses could be saved for a time in the future when you wouldn't be able to buy new eyeglasses (never mind that she couldn't see out of the old eyeglasses any more). We fought when I insisted that my artistic genius needed more than one color of a single tube of paint to find full expression.

We argued when she insisted on putting scraps of food into her handbag from the restaurant, like the plate of lemon wedges. "You never know when you'll need a lemon," she said. I argued, "Well, you will probably have some forewarning, won't you? I mean, you DO know when you need a lemon. It's not like you're going to find yourself on board a long sea journey suffering from scurvy and say, 'Thank Jehovah I saved these lemons!'"

It was futile to argue, of course. It all drove me wonky, but, for whatever reason, it was the purse that sent me, finally over the edge into despair and, then, enlightened acceptance.

Elsa had a purse from the 1950s. It was the sort of purse, probably bought at Woolworths that ladies carried on their crooked elbow. It had a big gold knob for the clasp, and was made from stiff fiberboard covered in thick black vinyl. While she had owned other purses in the intervening years, none had been of good quality, and the black purse was the final survivor.

I tried luring her to different, modern handbags, but she was not amenable. And even though the old bag was clearly disintegrating from age and use, I wasn't making any progress. So, one year, I took it upon myself to deconstruct the black purse. "What is it, exactly, that you like about this bag? Is it the color? The size, the shape, the vinyl, the handle? It doesn't have pockets or compartments, so everything just ends up in a jumble inside. Do you A) like that or B) not like that?"

After a thorough inventory of the various merits of the purse, I was able to construct a profile of my mother's ideal handbag. She did not, in fact, like black. She had had a red purse as a young woman, and preferred red. She liked the short handle, but did not like having just one compartment. She did not like the clasp, and thought a zipper would be more secure. But she liked the fact that it was so unassuming that no one would think she was carrying a lot of money and rob her (not a persistent problem in Eastsound at the time). In fact, from my survey, I concluded that she didn't like the black purse at all beyond the handle and its lack of attraction to purse-snatchers. My thinking was that she had never accepted any other purse, because I hadn't, yet, given her the right KIND of purse.

Let me count the ways I can be wrong.

With Christmas coming along, I went on a hunt for the perfect purse. The perfect RED purse, reminiscent of a long-ago loved handbag. And, eventually, I found one. It was red leather, with a short handle, a zipper and several (but not too many) outer and inner compartments. It was a purse that said, "I am attractive and durable, but my owner is a cautious woman, so I'm only carrying $7 and some Kleenex." It was not a Hermes Birken bag, or fashionable. This bag would never be featured in "In Touch" magazine's edition devoted to "Celebrity Purses", but it was a nice bag nonetheless. I was pleased with myself. And Elsa was pleased as well. It was the last Christmas that she was fully present, and she sat with it on her lap the entire day. She admired its beautiful color and the feel of its soft tumbled leather. She turned it over and over again, saying that she had never seen a bag so fine.

When the frenzy of Christmas morning quieted down, I said, "Well, let's put your stuff in it." And I started transferring the contents of the old bag into the new one. She was horrified. "I can't use this for everyday! It's too nice. Someone will steal it!" Thus, we began again.

I had the foresight to throw the old purse outdoors in the trash. She had the foresight to anticipate this, dig it out of the trash and hide it at the bottom of her suitcase. Over the next year, I would visit and keep filling up the new purse and hiding the old purse. Elsa, then, started carrying her things in non-purses, like shopping bags and canvas totes. Eventually, I just gave up, took the red purse home and wrapped it in tissue paper. Even now, I move that handbag around every time I tidy my closet. I'll never use it - it's got the wrong handle, too many pockets and a zipper. But I think I'll always keep it as a reminder of that last Christmas and of something the Buddha once said:

"When we understand, things are just as they are. When we don't understand, things are just as they are."

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Ingrid is currently living and respectably employed in Austin, Texas with a firm specializing in environmental law. She hopes to get back home to the San Juan Islands next spring to stay.
While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." Besides a passion for Tiki Studies, Ingrid is borderline biblio-obsessive. She is an old-school Libran - i.e., she won't be leading the Revolution, but she'll work to make it an attractive affair and hire the musicians and caterers."

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

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