Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Suitcase Story

When my sister came over our place to help out with our tag sale, she saw that I had two of my mother's suitcases in the basement. I told her that one of them was broken, which we didn't discover until I tried to close it while the taxi was already waiting at our front door.

"Oh," she said. "That suitcase has been broken for a while. I knew about that."

Which begs the question: Why did my mother lend me a busted suitcase?

This is the sort of things she does, which makes me think that she lives in a parallel universe, one in which suitcases miraculously fix themselves.

This busted suitcase caused Peter and me a tremendous amount of stress. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is after spending two hours finally managing to squeeze everything we wanted to bring into the suitcase -- only to discover that we couldn't lock it? All this so that we could check our bags for once in our lives.

(This came after an hour-long conversation on checking vs. not-checking, with me always on the side of not-checking because I grew up as a paranoid New Yorker. I haven't checked a bag in about fifteen years. I have really bad luck with checking because my bags are always sent to Alaska whenever I'm going to any other location. Peter finally won the debate by saying, "I will BUY YOU a new WHATEVER GETS LOST if we can PLEASE CHECK THE STUPID FREAKIN' BAGS!)

Luckily (I thought), I had borrowed not one, but TWO suitcases from my mom for precisely this event. But as it turns out, I should have borrowed THREE suitcases because the other one was missing its keys, keys my mother forgot to include when she lent me the suitcase. So we ended up having to not-check our bags. And we are now going to buy our own suitcases so that we will know what our suitcase situation is at all times. And no one is allowed to borrow our suitcases because that would put the knowledge of our suitcase situation into jeopardy once again, and we can't have that.

However, I did find a couple of my dad's bank statements and some important papers in his suitcase. When I told my mother about it, she said, "So THAT's where it went! Your dad is SOOO disorganized. We would NEVER have found that paperwork if you hadn't borrowed the suitcase!"

The sad thing is that I have inherited my father's keen sense of organization. Which drives Peter Up. The. Wall.

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