Oh Bury Me Not in a Shoulder Tote

I've been in a time warp, I guess. We're flying to New York next week (our first flight in eight years), and our usual auto trip luggage has to be reconsidered for today's air travel. Barb's baby blue Samsonite train case won't survive it: after thirty years' use, it's chromed clasp flips open sometimes as we carry it by the top handle, and all the lipsticks, nail files, hair rollers and dryers, toothbrushes and q-tips, shampoos, conditioners, mouthwashes, toothpastes, soaps and other essentials it organizes in its two plastic trays go clittering and clattering across the walk or stairs. So I wanted to get her a new train case, and we went to the luggage store at the local mall to find one. It was the first time I've been in a luggage store in about a decade. Things have changed.

I thought at first I'd stepped into the back-to-school store. Gone were the racks of neat rows of hard-shell suitcases and trunks, valises and leather briefcases I'd grown up with. In their place were basically shapeless canvas backpacks and amorphous gym bags with wheels. When I checked their attached pricetags, I learned these were not just children's school backpacks, which might have cost ten or twenty dollars. These were luggage. These cost hundreds of dollars.

They sure looked like backpacks though. Or gym bags. Or a Claus Oldenburg stuffed typewriter or soft cheeseburger. The only thing vaguely resembling a suitcase as I remembered one was a two-hundred-dollar Samsonite, bright red fiberglass shell (also with wheels), and there were no train cases anywhere. It seems that to replace the train case, we were supposed to buy something they called a "shoulder tote" instead, which looked like a canvas covered small gym bag with shoulder straps. Most models began at about seventy to ninety dollars.

The designers of these bags had seemingly gone to some lengths to convince the user that its single interior breadbox of space was the perfect place to organize all a lady's essentials. It had removable dividers, elastic loops in neat rows for pencil-shaped objects like toothbrushes, eyeliners, and lipsticks, files, and trimmers; and it also contained plastic tubes, transluscent zipping plastic compartments, and zippered nets all around the sides for items too sundry to categorize or capture with the loops. Some models of totes unsnapped into an impressive descending cascade of panels like a booklet of postcards and had a small hangar at the top to fit over a doorknob, where the cosmetic cascade could be deployed to greatest effect and the user could hope to find what she put where. It would probably be impossible, in fact, to find anything in its closed, travel position. I wondered what she would do if she just wanted to reach for something. Would she have to stand and, holding the hangar overhead with one hand, fling the accordioned panels down to their full length to see them?

We looked at many makes and models, but we couldn't make up our minds, despite the pricey tag prices and the advice and helpfulness of two salespeople who sensed our naivete, between a small laptop-case sized object called The Essentials and a larger model called the Elite. We bought them both, and we were pleasantly surprised to find that they were both deep-discounted at the register.

In retrospect, I think I agree that soft-sided shoulder totes and extended-handle, wheeled luggage units of today make more sense than the awkward, heavy, hand-carried boxes and trunks of my day and the fiberglass clamshells of my wife's, which were forever banging into our bodies and making bruises as we rushed through terminals and garages. These shapeless blobs of our contained possessions with which we clothe ourselves and make ourselves presentable to the world as we travel, pack and handle better as workers heave and cram them into cargo hold heaps and scatter them across stainless revolving pickup wheels. They don't hurt as much when we bang into each other with them, and they are more pliable as we hoist them into overhead compartments and cram them under seats. And somehow they feel more "organic" and comfortable overall.

The new luggage, like the new looser-fit, baggy flight clothing we watch Amazing Race contestants like Amber and Rob, Uchenna and Joyce, Meditith and Gretchen (we identify the most with them at our age) rush around in, makes travel more comfortable; We're looking forward to using it and probably getting some more in the near future.