The Phone Books of Our Lives

Whether it is a Dex, McPherson, or whatever local phone book you may have for your area; like clockwork every year a new and updated phone book will be sitting at your front door. There is an old ad slogan that goes "let your fingers do the walking."  This suggests that you can find anything you are looking for by merely two stepping with your fingers across the Yellow Pages of the phone book.

For the same sort of convenient information reference, most homes also have a more personal self made phone book. They are readily available at any drug or business supply store and come in a variety of sizes and colors. They all have tabbed alphabetical section dividers and the pages are lined for neat and organized use. But if you are like me, our home phone book (since ours is the color gold we refer to it as "the gold book") is anything but neat and organized. Unlike the mass distributed commercial phone book, our home phone book does not get updated every year. It will instead get added to from time to time. But, with this added information also comes scratched out numbers, scribbled in new numbers, and names and numbers written on Post It notes stuck to pages.  Also in our phone book, those alphabetical tabs may or may not give lead to information necessarily beginning with that particular letter of the alphabet. Often time's numbers are stored under the letter of someones first name simply because I can't remember their last name, or never new it to begin with. A phone number may be listed under the letter "C" for "cousins," where you will find a list of my cousin's names with their phone numbers. Those blank dividing pages that hold the alphabetical letter tag also make very good scratch paper while you are talking to some one on the phone. For instance, I know I can always go back to the "C" page and find the cookie recipe that my Dad gave me years ago.

 Plus, along with an assortment of Chinese food and pizza menus of restaurants from all of the towns that we have lived in, the front and back inside pockets are bulging with pages of typed phone lists from fire departments and from churches we have attended dating back to 1980.  

Yes, our phone book has "seen its day".  But, it is a collection of friends and family of our lives that can also be considered a time capsule of sorts. Leafing through the menus and listings of people and businesses that are assembled in this tattered and dated phone book, I can recall the times and places of our life lived. This sort of organized chaos is indicative of why I don't scrap book and why I rarely have my Christmas shopping done until December 24^Th. 

Oh, I could go out and get a new home phone book and transfer names and numbers from the old one to achieve an updated and current source of information. But I like to think of it as, growing old together.  Just as there is still more room in the cover pockets and pages of that old phone book, there is still room in our lives for more friends and family with changing names and phone numbers that we can meet up with at new favorite restaurants with take out menus.

Pursuit of the Perfect Purse

It seems in life that men are forever chasing golf balls, a plaid shirt that is almost identical to the others they already have, or the next new car smell. Women, on the other hand, are in constant pursuit of the perfect purse.

I sit here in a chair looking at a collection of used purses laid out on a table at our garage sale. I recall how each served a purpose at one time in my life. They provided not only a practical means of portable storage with their impressive amounts of pockets and compartments, but also an attempt to make some sort of personal fashion statement.  If asked, I could not specify why any one of those purses inevitably was emptied and put high on the shelf in the closet.  And I can't explain why I continue to tolerate my current purse that has only one pocket, but otherwise is just a bottomless pit.  They should make an "app" for locating items in your purse. But, that would only work if I could actually find my phone that is lost somewhere in the black hole that is my purse. Come to think of it, I do know why I still put up with this particular purse. Yes, it is stylish and when I first saw it, it some how spoke to me that it was the purse for me. The only plausible reason would be that of pure destiny. But, the real reason that I continue to use this purse is because it brings back the memories that go with it when I bought it.

It was a couple of years ago now that we were in New York City with my sister and her family. We were daring the New York adventure of shopping for underground black market designer purses. Having navigated Canal Street before, my sister knew just the right winks and nods it took to connect with the sales people that would guide us past the store fronts and down into the secret chambers of wholesale brand name purses. The game was to play the shopper that is unwilling to accept the ticket price and even make the move of walking away. This of course, prompted the last ditch effort of bargaining for a price that would not only seal the deal, but make for the best stories of the trip. My sister, and her soon to be daughter-in-law, bought a couple of purses for a fraction of the cost of retail. They nonchalantly surfaced back onto the street carrying their contraband in the tell-tale black plastic bags that indicated to all of the other black market dealers that they were "players".

That experience in itself was a blast, but I really didn't need a purse and up to that point had no reason to buy one.  While we continued our journey through the purse stores of Canal Street, we walked into a small unobtrusive store displaying more purses that pretty much looked like all of the other purses that we had seen so far;  except for that "one" purse.  For some reason I was drawn to it. Nobody else in the group paid any attention to it. I picked it up and threw it over my shoulder; it just felt right. I put it back on the shelf and tried to convince myself that even at that ridiculously low price, I didn't need a purse. I started to walk away but somehow felt compelled to turn around and look at it just one more time. I figured by doing that and not turning into a pillar of salt, it was God's will that I buy that purse after all.

As of today I still use this purse. Oh, some day another purse will come along and invariably take its place, or out of necessity due to wear and tear I will need to buy another purse. But, until such time, I will continue to dive for keys, pens, floss, and the like, that are buried deep in the bottom of this purse. You see, every time I pick up that purse it takes me back to Canal Street in New York City, and all the precious times shared there with my sister and family.  Some day in the future there will come another garage sale where I will lay this purse onto the table and attach to it a piece of masking tape with a price on it. Maybe when that day comes, some one else will see that purse and, for whatever reason, it will speak to them too.

You know that old saying that "garage sales are one man's junk but another man's treasure"?  I don't think of it as "junk", but rather just closure to treasured memories that are about to take on a new story when someone else takes home their own new found "treasure".