Suitcases

For ten weeks, I have been living out of two suitcases (ah, and an accompanying trash bag we accumulate dirty laundry in).  it's driving me mad, and I haven't come close to the two biggest hazards of using suitcases.  --damaging or losing them. Most of that happens when the airlines get involved.  We have stayed on the ground.   Despite their presence, I have on two occasions had to go buy shirts and even a suit.  You see, the suitcase manufacturers have developed suitcases with "moisture wicking" liners, but so far, none of them will wash a shirt or two when you run out of clean ones.  Hence, the two new shirts.  

The suit is another story.  I put it in the cleaners, failing to notice the store would be closed from July 4th until the 8th.  Since we hsd to leave on the 7th, I had to buy a suit while on the road.  No biggie, but how many suits does a retired man with his oldest married, and his youngest nowhere near.  I don't plan to wear a suit for the dirt  nap--I am thinking cremation.  

Which brings me back to Suitcase Simpson, often thought to have been named Suitcase because he moved so frequently from one team to another, he was instead called Suitcase after a comic book character with feet as big as suitcases.  Some of you may only know of the ballplayer from Tom Selleck's movies as Jesse Stone, a Robert Parker hero who serves as police chief in a small Massachusetts town called Paradise.  When Selleck/Stone arrives in Paradise, he finds a young officer named Simpson, and promptly dubs him "Suitcase" in recognition of the old former ballplayer who was among the first dozen or so black athletes to integrate the American League.  I'm old enough and happen to be from Chicago, so I remember Suitcase as a player who joined the White Sox at the beginning of 1959, was traded away during the drive for the 1959 pennant the White Sox won, then promptly returned in 1960, just missing the only White Sox World Series check in a period of fifty or so years during which the White Sox never appeared there.  

Wikipedia's contribution is below:

"A suitcase is a general term for a distinguishable form of luggage. It is often a somewhat flat, rectangular-shaped bag with rounded/square corners, either metal, hard plastic or made of cloth, vinyl or leather that more or less keeps its shape. It has a carrying handle on one side and is used mainly for transporting clothes and other possessions during trips. It opens on hinges like a door. Suitcases lock with keys or a combination."

Wikipedia indicates it is "Mainly used for transporting clothes and other possessions during trips."  Oh, sure, and dirty clothes, books, forwarded mail. prescription meds, a power strip with charging cords for your iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Laptop, and who knows what all.  The thing that stuck in my mind was the phrase, "It opens on hinges like a door."  Has living out of a suitcase felt like opening a door?  I think not.  More like closing a window.  Every time you are lucky enough to find what you actually went looking for, you have to stuff everything else back in and struggle to zip it closed again.  God, I love suitcases.  

Dragging these things around, and relying on them to hold what's important, just doesn't seem right.  On loan from home to help you transit out and back can be ok, but ten weeks just doesn't seem like the right kind of time frame, and indefinite doesn't seem to be the right destination.