Chivalry Ends at Weight of Wife’s Purse

My wife and I made a quick plane trip to Puerto Vallarta the other day to escort her mother to Orange County, where she had made an appointment to see an eye doctor. I’m afraid I exaggerate when I say the plane trip was quick. Oh, it was quick enough when the plane got into the air. It was the waiting on the ground that made it into nearly an all-day trip, going and coming.

It seems that our Mexicana Airline flight was late, something that often happens, according to the Americans who live nearly year-round in Puerto Vallarta, and this includes my mother-in-law.

And that brings me to my wife’s purse.

There’s no logical reason that it should, of course, but I’ve got to drag my wife’s purse into this column somehow or other, and this is as good a place as any.

Perhaps I should have begun by saying that my mother-in-law admired my wife’s purse to the point of wanting one like it. I’ve tried to discourage that by putting it down as foolhardy. After all, my mother-in-law is not as young as she used to be. Let’s face it. She’s old. And she’s not nearly as strong physically as my wife.

My wife is a great talker about exercise, but she doesn’t do much of it in a disciplined way. She doesn’t have to. She gets all the exercise she needs carrying that purse of hers.

It’s made of leather and it’s the largest she could find. If they made a larger one, they’d have to sell it as a suitcase. It has outside pockets almost the size of attache cases, and inside pockets galore.

When she loses it around the house, which is far too often to suit me, and asks me to help her find it, I have to remember to bend my knees to lift to it so I won’t strain my back. The truth is that the purse in itself is not so terribly heavy. It’s what she carries in it that makes it into a weightlifter’s challenge.

I must confess it was a good thing the plane was more than an hour late taking off from Los Angeles. My wife insisted that she carry our passports and plane tickets in her purse. She claims they’re safe there. No purse snatcher is going to run very far without suffering a cardiac arrest.

But it does take time to find something in that purse. When she looked for a pen to fill out the tourist forms, she removed enough wadded-up Kleenexes to stuff a teddy bear, about six lead pencils, some old peppermint candy, three grocery lists, a screwdriver she usually keeps in a kitchen drawer and figured she’d lost, a paperback novel, a magnifying glass, three or four old letters she’d meant to answer, one of my old jackknives with corkscrew (you never know when it might come in handy), a stock certificate that should have been in the safe-deposit vault, and the discovery of discoveries--a pair of reading glasses she’d spent two weeks looking for.

At last, when she located a pen, she found five other pens as well.

At that point, I snatched away the boarding passes, which had emerged among the other discoveries, and put them into my coat pocket. I was darned if I wanted to miss that plane while she searched for them in her purse. The Wright brothers probably built their plane in less time.

When, at long last, we boarded the airplane, the flight attendant took one look at my wife’s purse and said that all carry-on luggage should be stowed beneath the seat.

Puerto Vallarta was hot and muggy. We stayed in her mother’s house, where between the mosquitoes feasting on me at night, the donkeys braying, the roosters crowing and the natives playing rock music in nearby houses with open windows until the wee morning hours, I was so tired during the day that I barely made it over the cobblestoned streets with my wife while she shopped.

It was the pesos--524 of them to $1--that nearly undid my wife. She was forced to admit that $50 worth of pesos, some of it in coins, added to her purse, and in that heat, had created a genuine problem of endurance.

Prudently, I did not offer to carry her purse. Chivalry has its place, and this was not it.