Apr '24 06 - 21:39The Purse

For a while when I was a little boy...

I carried around a purse my mother had given me.  Not long after I began carrying it my father decided it would be better if I put the purse inside a paper bag.   That way people wouldn't know what it was his son was carrying.  So I did that.
Soon, however, I began putting other things into the bag as well. First it was just pinwheels and French postcards, hundreds of them.  Then I began putting in clumps of cat fur and shards of colored glass and archaic, functionless machine parts.  Quickly I graduated to scarabs and Egyptian erotica, especially the manuscript fragments of the Heliotropic poets of Giza.  My favorit treasures of all were the 27 gesture diagrams for one-armed clowns. It was quite a collection.  I called it Paraphernalia for Defending Myself in a Nightmare and it served me well untill recently when the bag broke on 161st and Broadway in Washington Heights.  There was quite a commotion at first, and perhaps I underestimated the power of 35 years of accumulated chaos.  When the bag split open there was no mystery left just a dry heat and a grey light. The purse was no longer in there. I had outgrown it.