I almost didn’t write this one, I thought the inspiration was frivolous, a little too mock-heroic. But these little essays often begin as such: I set aside an hour, empty my mind for a moment, then an idea appears and I start to run with it.
Still, tote bags?
Tote bags were always around, growing up. My mother uses them for everything. My dad uses enormous ones, the heavy L.L. Bean canvas models, to lug fabric samples up and down clients’ stairs. Whenever we took a trip on a plane, my dad always had a tote of some kind, sometimes fancy ones, for his papers and books.
I remember watching the documentary Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates when it came out and was rapt to learn about his book-buying habit: each month he stocks up on new titles and carries them around in a tote, and it’s one of his assistants’ jobs to launder the bag before new books arrive.
Tote bags today are everywhere, too many, ubiquitous, emblems of virtue, mostly crap. You throw two of them in a closet, a week later you’ve got sixteen.
From Wikipedia:
A 2014 study of U.S. consumers found that the 28% of respondents who own reusable bags forgot them on approximately 40% of their grocery trips and used the bags only about 15 times each before discarding them.
The best tote bag I ever knew, my sister gave me in the mid-aughts. It was a holiday present from The Food Network, her employer at the time. Large, extremely sturdy, made from tan canvas with the lower half wrapped in a sturdy, rubbery green nylon to absorb wear. It had long leather handles and an inside zippered pocket. I lugged it to the beach, the grocery store – it was cherished, it gave me a weird uplift to use it. Then one day, last year, it was gone.
What are tote bags, if I look at them from a height? A catch-all, a holdall, a big tent upside-down. But sometimes innocence doesn’t feel innocent; I’m not sure what it says about me to be so interested in containers, in neatness, in needing to be prepared. (There may be darkness there). There does always seem to be room in my life for another bag. It’s Hilbert’s Grand Hotel Paradox applied to kit: I have an infinite number of bags, each fulfilling its purpose, and no room for any more, then a new bag arrives and I bump all the others down my chain of interest, and devise a need for what’s arrived.
How many bags do I have, though, really, that are so multi-use. I have a backpack for backpacking, a backpack for mountaineering, a backpack for backcountry snowboarding, and a backpack for walks. A rock-climbing backpack I find to be excellent for extended plane travel, matching duffels for normal car travel, and a simple black canvas weekend bag. But it’s a tote bag that gets me to the office, stuffed with crap for all situations. It’s like my skull in that way: I fill my mind with books, magazine articles, random quotes, podcast episodes, partly because I never know when something will secrete out later in some interesting way.
Tote bags are discardable, abandon-able, but many calmly still persist.
The tan and green one is going to reappear, I just know it.
In tomorrow’s supplement for supporters, with three-plus things to love:
My preferred app for listening to podcasts
New (and newish) dance music, plus some trailers for upcoming films I want to see
The results of re-learning the marimba
What the what
Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly dispatch from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Supporters receive a Sunday supplement with 3+ things to love, along with a longer piece once a month sent from the road, for some inbox wanderlust. ⛰️
Books mentioned in Meditations in an Emergency are stored in a Bookshop list.