The Search for the Perfect Purse

Last updated on: June 6, 2018 at 8:46 am by Anne Kennedy

The Search for the Perfect Purse 2018-06-06T08:46:35-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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One thing about me drives my husband crazy. It isn’t my fretting desire to keep a perfect house, or my categorical refusal to watch suspenseful tv shows with him, about which he occasionally mutters discontent. No, it is my lifelong search for two elusive items, neither of which he can fathom wanting to own, let alone trudging through the highways and byways of this consumptive, cheapened land to dig out and discover them.

Those two things are perfect red shoes and a perfect handbag. Or purse if you rather.

The red shoes go without saying. I have a row of them. Six pairs at least, and more make their way in and out of my amazon wishlist as I mull over the devices and desires of my heart day by day. A shoe should be right, but sometimes you just shove your feet into whatever’s at hand, hem, or foot. I live in a land where mostly I have to be able to muck out snow and mud. The nicely apportioned red heel sits on my shelf mute and neglected most of the year. I look at it and wish I were putting it on.

But a handbag. A purse. The intimate hidden life of your things held together with themselves—that has to be right, or as much as it is humanly and financially possible to approximate truth, goodness, and beauty. The shape has to be right. The arrangement of pockets has to be thoughtful. The material has to be smooth. The color has to adorn outfit and acknowledge season. And over all this, the bag must both communicate itself to you, and translate you to the world. Try going along with the wrong bag day after day and the depression of your spirits will eventually make it hard for you to get out of bed in the morning. But if the bag is right, and goes on being right, you have discovered something almost as good as human love.

Not to fall into the trap of confusing things with people and people with things. That would be idolatrous.

But if you can avoid that ubiquitous pit, the perfect handbag will guard you against the decadent Gnosticism of this age—the tragic lie that the body doesn’t matter, that the constraints and confines of the mortal person are unworthy of consideration and care, that it doesn’t matter what you do with yourself or to yourself, because it’s only the spirit that matters.

Kate Spade, with all her artistic cunning, helped tether even me—as I clung evermore to her small sleek over the shoulder black purse, acquired felicitously at my local consignment shop—to the ordinary charm of my fleshly self. I rush up and down the over-bright aisles of Walmart, the over-stacked pallets of Aldi, the miserably complicated self-checkout of Price Chopper gripping this bag and my life, battling down despair to open my eyes to the world.

Grief, then, flows over that the person who so helped me, by the imagination and trouble of her own mind and heart, should have lost her own way, should have been so burdened as to cut the thread between her spirit and her body. I pray that God somehow caught her in the end, that somehow he translated her into his own presence.

And to every lost and troubled person—your body matters. What you put on, what you wear, what you handle, what holds you together both inwardly and outwardly, all those things point evermore to a God who holds the world together in himself. If you have to grab something, grab him. But then remember that you couldn’t, and so he came all the way to catch a hold of you.

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