Why I Own So Many Cardigans

A true, and somewhat embarrassing fact:

When I buy clothes, I have to leave the dressing room and find the most cutely attired sales lady, preferably around my own age or a little younger.

I show her what I'm wearing and then I ask: "Do I look like a 65-year-old librarian?"

Okay, no, wait. There is NOTHING WRONG with being a 65-year-old librarian. One of my favorite people in the whole world was a librarian, and honestly, it would be an enormous accomplishment to resemble her in anyway.

But that said, I am not 65, nor a librarian, and should not dress like one. And also one of the most surprising things about My Favorite Librarian was the extent to which she bucked one's expectations of librarians and their ways. So what I am really asking the sales person is: Picture the most stereotypical image of a tragically fuddy-duddyish person at their most ridiculous. Do I look like that?

The answer, btw, is almost always yes. And I am then required, almost always, to swap out one or more pieces of clothing until the overall look more closely resembles something a person of my age, gender and professional background would wear.

(Note: A process which more exhausting than ever, now that I work in an industry that considers a blazer-with-jeans appropriate wear for everything up to and including weddings and, depending on the deceased, some funerals.)

All of this is a long way of saying that even though I know it is wrong, even though I know I must not give in, nonetheless, I am drawn, like a moth to the flame, to this beauty:



God, it's awful. I know that. It's a half purse, with a wallet sort of fused onto the back. And yet, it has a siren's hold on my heart.

In part, it's the little pockets. Oh Jesus, how I love little pockets. Remember those commercials for that purse that allowed bedraggled career gals to stuff a metric ton of possessions into one easy-to-tote purse? (Available in black, brown and, fascinatingly, bone. Always bone. I don't know if I've ever seen a woman with an off-white leather handbag even once in my entire life.)

If I can think of an appropriate Google string, I might look for a copy of the commercial online. I remember a few of the things that fit inside the bag: A hook for keys, a slot for a wallet, and I think, a pocket for a small umbrella. And yet I remember there were at least a dozen specific pockets. And all this well before the era of cell phones, PDAS or even Walkman radios.

The madness will pass in time, preferably before Levenger sells out of the bag and I am reduced to eBay stalking. (Have I no shame? Apparently not.) Until then, I will pine for this wildly age-inappropriate item like a wolf, yearning for a poured-concrete zoo habitat even as she takes for granted the freedom of her native scrub-covered plains.