Disposing Childhood Baggage

I am one of the most frugal people you’ll ever meet. I think part of it is a result of having to count pennies to buy milk each week when I was a kid. Part of it is in my genes though, too. For decades, my mother wore these terribly ugly, big, round Sally Jesse Raphael glasses with tacky red plastic frames. All three of us kids took turns trying to throw them away – I even stuffed them at the very bottom of the garbage can on my day to take out the trash – but low and behold, my mother found them and fished them right back out, and we were stuck with what we, at that time, thought was the most embarrassing, unfashionable mother in the world.

My father is the same. He had a plain white T-shirt from the 70s, which he wore well into the 90s, where it transgressed into an unbecoming grey, complete with oil spills and sweat stains. For years we tried to get him to chuck the thing out, but he kept saying that it was a perfectly good shirt, so why throw it away? On a momentous day, my father was hiking through the woods and got this shirt caught on a blackberry bush. With the T-shirt ripped up the side, all three of us kids felt blessed. But my father was a reduce-reuse-recycle kind of guy, well before the green wave came around, so the T-shirt was turned into a dog collar for about four years, then an oil rag for the old car he was restoring. I was over at my parents’ house a few weeks ago; my mother asked me to grab some cola from the garage, and there was the T-shirt turned cloth, in all its black, filthy glory. To my disgust, my mother still has those horrible glasses, but promises that she only uses them when she can’t find her regular reading ones (which I have a feeling is more often than I want to imagine).

Needless to say, although I don’t have ugly glasses, nor shirts that have lasted more than fifteen years (although I must admit, I DO have a few that have hit the ten year mark), I inherited the frugality gene, which at times is a blessing, but other times a bit annoying, especially when my partner wants to splurge on a trip to Vegas.

I’ve never been to Sin City, and didn’t think I ever wanted to go. I picture the city of Vegas to be one massive slot machine that opens up and sucks money right out of your pockets. To me, gambling seems like the most imprudent thing a person could do, but we need a weekend away, the flights were cheap (even I agreed with that) and my partner promises me that we will do other things than sit and gamble all day.

The temperature in Vegas during the month of June can get up past 100ºF, so we’re not planning on packing much at all. Bathing suits, a couple of pairs of shorts, shirts, and a light sweater for when we are inside with the air conditioning; maybe a nice outfit when we go out for my partner’s birthday dinner, but other than that, there really isn’t much to bring.

Nevertheless, we need new luggage. I have never owned a new suitcase or travel bag; I have always relied on hand-me-downs, but in my family, the chance of obtaining hand-me-downs doesn’t come around too often (and when they do, you can imagine the state of things passed on). The suitcases that we do have either have broken zippers, jammed up wheels, broken handles, or all three of these ailments. Plus, the suitcases are all black, and I can’t tell you how much time we have wasted in front of the conveyor belt at airports, watching black suitcase after black suitcase go around and around, people grabbing at them with the hope that it belongs to them, then throwing them carelessly back after reading the luggage tag with somebody else’s name and address.

We want sturdy, bright, and sensible luggage and accessories for this upcoming trip. With my aversion to paying too much for too little, we are looking at a ton of good quality, economical luggage sets from Cymax that fit our budget and make me feel as though I’m not throwing money away. Maybe with the savings I keep after purchasing my suitcases, I can afford to gamble a little bit. After all, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right?