The Old Bag
Let’s not get too emotional about it.
I was in college in 1989 when backpacks began losing clout on campus as the preferred carryall. A new age of the low-slung cloth messenger bag had taken hold, so I ditched my backpack and bought a black canvas bag with shoulder strap. It wasn’t a messenger bag because I don’t follow the flock. This bag was smaller, more like a satchel, a bit less costly. Close enough, I figured.
That bag is 36 years old and remains at my side. It moved with me from Indiana to Illinois to California to Texas, a silent witness to my interviews with politicians, actors, singers, athletes, bartenders, chefs, lawyers, dogwalkers, winemakers, artists, and two people who earnestly believe that their house is haunted. It’s traveled with me to more than 30 US states and 13 non-US countries. It’s doubled as a pillow on airplanes, busses, taxis, and in the bathroom at the Four Seasons in Paris after an extended period of furiously writing notes while my jet-lagged wife slept soundly, profoundly, and comfortably in the bed.
These days, my wife of 21 years (19 of them after that Paris trip) refers to my satchel as the “filthy thing” whenever she sees it, which is almost daily. Some loose threads and broken zippers are bad enough but she’s more offended by 36 years of accumulated crud. It’s not my books, pens, scraps of paper, and other writers’ tools that get to her; it’s the crumbs, dirt, and gunk. The ancient stains. The dried chewing gum. (Heaven help her if she ever looks inside.)
She has sincerely offered many times over the last 16 or so years to replace it with anything I want.
Immediately after purchasing the bag it nearly failed me. I had bought a semester’s worth of textbooks at the same time only to discover the bag held a maximum of three English lit anthologies—only two if one of them was The Riverside Shakespeare. However, the bag was ingeniously made with a zippered bottom to expand its total capacity to include a paperback novel, a slim notebook, and four pens.
The bag was never agreeable when I rode my bike, which I did everywhere, because the overstuffed pocketbook tended to slide off my back toward the street and swing like a pendulum between my legs as I peddled.
I didn’t purchase the bag for my days as a student. I bought it, and I was determined to make it work, because writers always have some type of carryall. I had no clue at the time what writers really carried in their bags, I assumed a flask would be pretty standard, but I was sure I would need one for the future. I may have inadvertently chosen my profession when I chose the bag.
I won’t bother writing My point isn’t the bag itself, of course. The point is the simple, glorious stubbornness of endurance. In a culture that has mistaken planned obsolescence for progress, holding onto a functional object past its aesthetic expiration date feels like a small, necessary act of rebellion. I won’t do it because the point is precisely the bag itself.
I don’t tend to develop emotional relationships with inanimate objects (unless there’s a really good story with it). And I lose things because I use things: my bought-and-paid-for pens, combs, jackets, lighters, small electronics, pocketknives, hotel-room keys, CDs, books, and hundreds of sunglasses are strewn across the globe because they were with me right up to the point in time when sunlight came between us and I didn’t bother to notice. Ironic, yes, because my old bag was essentially designed to carry a lot of those objects.
I won’t upgrade easily. After the seventh- or eighth-grade, I rarely became that person who had to have the newest gadget or doo-dad immediately. I still don’t covet smartphones, watches, cars, or computers, and there’s no sense asking me to identify the brand or series or other identifying information of the things I own because I actively don’t retain it.
There are a few singularities to the universal constant I represent in this story, like a new novel from Stephen R. Donaldson and new music from Sid Grimes. I need to possess those right away. Back in the early 1990s, just as soon as Grateful Dead tickets went on sale—anywhere—I fought like a Viking to get my hands on a pair. That usually meant furious, horrible, dehumanizing tests of determination against my fellow Deadheads, whom I adore, as we overloaded America’s telephone-line-capacity to reach Ticketmaster in 14 minutes before tickets sold out. Those were anxious times, but my bag—with hidden pockets that no security official has ever found—made it to at least 30 shows.
If you’re expecting more memories at this point, like maybe something sweet about how the bag went along on our honeymoon drive across Route 66, or how it was the only thing I took with me when I was on a press trip in Tahiti and had to flee to higher ground because of a coming tsunami, I’m afraid I’m not going write any of that stuff because this isn’t about nostalgia.
I’m not in love with my bag. When I look at my bag I don’t see an old pal or my trusty road-trip sidekick. I see it for what it is: a tatty accessory that retains an unholy amount of germs. I don’t need to learn how to use it. I need to learn how to not leave it alone somewhere in the world. My photographer-buddy Kirk Weddle always says, “You got your purse?” before we leave a job, but Kirk can’t be there all the time.
Nietzsche said the hardest thing in life is to be yourself. Sure, I’m working on that, but after more than three decades of service this bag remains a bag. It carries my things. Until the day it ceases to function, where I go it goes.
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Anthony Head mostly writes about Texas.
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Amazing, evocative piece! While I have never hung on to a bag for quite this long, I am very invested in & obsessed with my own bulky crossbody messenger bags...& always will be.