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Blogs by Carol Culver Rzadkiewicz
More Money Than Common Sense 8/15/2008 11:07:23 PM
I can hear what my mama would say to such frivolity. She’d say, “Anybody who’d spend that kind of money on a pocketbook has got to have a lot more money than they’ve got common sense.”
At you know by now, well, that is if you are a regular reader of my blog, I enjoy the newspaper, specifically The Advocate, which, as you also know by now, is My Newspaper of Choice. Not that I enjoy everything The Advocate has to offer its readership, one example being a regular feature called “Style File.”
Style File appears in the People section every Tuesday and is basically a Man/Woman-on-the-Street type of article, complete with a photo of the person who was unlucky enough to have been accosted on the streets of Baton Rouge and asked to answer a series of questions posed by Karen Martin (she’s the assistant People editor and writes the article).
The questions posed are the following:
Name
Occupation
Tell us what you’re wearing.
Who or what most influences your style?
What do you splurge on? (Didn’t any of her English teachers ever inform Ms. Martin that one should avoid ending a sentence with a preposition?)
On what do you skimp? (Now, this sentence is worded correctly.)
Are you a shoes or handbag kind of woman? (If the accosted is a man, she does not ask about handbags; instead, Ms. Martin names some other fashion accessory.)
You house is on fire and you can grab only one thing out of your closet. What would if be? (Her English teachers also obviously failed to tell Ms. Martin that one should not change verb tense between clauses that are addressing the same topic. That second clause should have read, “What will it be?”)
What’s your favorite beauty product? (If the accosted is a man, Ms. Martin uses a term like “grooming aid,” since although some men might use beauty products, none of them will admit it in public, especially to a newspaper reporter.)
Name the celebrity whose closet you would like to raid.
Well, in this past Tuesday’s Style File, the person Ms. Martin had “caught shopping at the Mall of Louisiana” (Doesn’t’ this make it sound as if she apprehended a criminal?) was Merryan Moore, who hails from Biloxi, Mississipp; and although, in my opinion, she might wish to locate a mall a bit closer to home, especially with gas as high as it is, I did find Ms. Moore’s response to question eight rather interesting:
Your house is on fire and you can grab only one thing out of your closet. What would it be?“My Hermes purse. There’s a waiting list for this purse. It goes for between $5,000 and $20,000, depending what style you get. That would be the biggie I would grab.” (Advocate, 2008, p. 1E)
As I read that response, since I had just taken a sip of coffee, I almost choked. “What?” I yet managed to sputter. Then coughing, my eyes watering, I again read Ms. Moore’s response. “Five to 20 thousand dollars,” I gasped. “Who on earth would spend that kind of money for a pocketbook?
Yes, a pocketbook, that’s what my mama called it, after all, not a purse; and she owned exactly two, one basic black everyday pocketbook for occasions like shopping in Fairburn after Daddy got paid, meeting with our teachers when my siblings or I got into trouble, or visiting kinfolks on Sundays; and another, also black but shiny patent leather, for dressier affairs, like going to church and attending the funerals of those same kinfolks.
And that reminds me. Before Bud started to school (Back then kids didn’t go to pre-K or kindergarten; they plunged right into first grade at M. P. Word Elementary), Mama gave him an old pocketbook; and my brother lugged that thing around everywhere he went. He used it to store such treasures as marbles, broken crayons, rocks, feathers, and dead worms. But no one bothered to tell Bud that boys didn’t carry pocketbooks, so when he began school, my brother carried his pocketbook with him as he marched into Ms. Woodall’s first grade classroom (Neither did kids have backpacks back then, which is probably one reason why they stood up straighter). Anyway, it wasn’t until lunchtime that Bud happened to glance around and notice that he was the only boy with a pocketbook on the table beside his plate. And it was at that moment that my brother experienced what was probably his first epiphany (an instantaneous moment of profound insight):
“Uh, oh,” he thought, “I’m the only boy with a pocketbook; and that means the other boys are gonna call me Sissy Boy.”
Glancing around to make sure that no one was paying him any mind, my brother then pushed that old pocketbook to the edge of the table, after which he picked up his plate and pint bottle of milk (neither did we have cardboard cartons back then) and nonchalantly strolled over to another table. Of course, later, as everyone was leaving the lunchroom, a kid spied the pocketbook there on the edge of the table and yelled, “Hey, somebody left their pocketbook.” But I’ll hand it to Bud; he kept his cool. He just glanced at the kid and shouted back, “Well, it sure ain’t my pocketbook.”
Anyway, as I was saying, Mama owned two pocketbooks; and, at most, each one probably cost only a few dollars. Allowing for inflation, these Hermes purses Ms. Moore mentioned probably would have sold for somewhere in the neighborhood of, rough estimate, $500 to $2,000 back when Bud was toting around our mama’s old pocketbook. And, do you know what? I can hear what my mama would say to such frivolity. She’d say, “Anybody who’d spend that kind of money on a pocketbook has got to have a lot more money than they’ve got common sense.”
After all, think about it: A pocketbook is a pocketbook, and just because one has a fancy name on it, that doesn’t mean it’s going to hold any more rocks, feathers, or dead worms than a pocketbook from Vickers’ 5 &10.
Martin, K. “Style File: Merryan Moore;” People; The Advocate; Tuesday, August 12, 2008; p. 1E.
