Some things would be better as Victorian flatware

My main purse-bag is starting to get an awfully funky smell and my tactic for procrastination (a clever combination of denial and hastily delving into its depths with breath held and eyes averted) is beginning to wear on even my supremely passive nerves. I will ascent that a small oddness of aroma can give something character (i.e., my dog), but the dread “mu-“s of the odor world (‘musty,’ and worse yet, ‘musky’) I make it my business to avoid.

A brief, and I assure you cranky, aside for those maternal eyes who in reading this take it upon themselves to question my commitment to hygiene and cleanliness. I have indeed subjected this bag (an oversized red-white cloth number with a pattern more suited to melodramatic Victorian flatware) to the rigors of my washing machine many times. And while at first this treatment restored my bag to its usual glory, recent washings have done little more than worry the seams.

Having defended my cleanliness, I must admit that I am not particularly surprised by the downward spiral of this particular bag. It is heavily abused daily as a receptacle of essential survival items: car keys, sandwiches, bedraggled wallet, mobile phone, S.S.S. (Small Softcover Salinger), thermos of tea in the winter and off-brand soda in the summer, snooty notebook bound in faux-leather, and several dozen pink pens lifted from my old job, each one advising women over 40 to get an annual mammogram. On top of stuffing the bag with the aforementioned smelly junk, I further debase it by chucking it unceremoniously into the back of my messy car or onto the shifty linoleum of restaurants and coffee shops. In short: If ever a satchel deserved to smell a little off, it is this one.

It does not escape me that the only logical, perhaps the only sanitary, solution here is to disregard the bag for another. But as my perception of logic is always hindered by a judgment-clouding excess of sentiment, I am somewhat disinclined to undertake this solution.

This bag and I have been through a lot together. I toured a few small corners of Europe carrying that bag stuffed to the seams with a nalgene, camera, umbrella, a couple of prairie-themed American novels, and everything that I deemed too valuable to leave in a hostel with the tagline “Hangovers Included”).

The bag has carried my lunches into two separate jobs and one ramshackle internship. Hundreds of sandwiches have been squashed within its generous embrace. The bag has seen me through my hummus in a Ziploc phase, my “white bread is practically wheat bread” phase, and, most recently, a misguided decaf Pepsi phase.

The longer I go on the more acutely aware I become of the strangeness of this post. And so I will close here, hoping to leave you with a feeling of suspense regarding the fate of my bag and my increasingly musty aroma.