More Than a Pocketbook
(The Handbag as An Emblem Of A Rite Of Passage)
By Ginny Good
Educational development director and artisan
"Handbags" by Barbara G.S. Hagerty
I remember when I bought my first real pocketbook, a grown-up pocketbook like our mothers carried. It was 1959, I was in the seventh grade, and my baby-sitting money of $0.50 an hour was hoarded preciously. I needed to save $15.00 for the Etienne Aligner pocketbook I had chosen at the Porgy and Bess dress ship: a lovely straw, Nantucket-like fisherman's basket with mahogany-colored leather straps and brass fittings. Proud is inadequate to describe the way I felt as the new owner of this wonderful grown-up pocketbook. I was the envy of my friends. It was my treasure, and as such, it was well cared for and well loved.
I used that pocketbook through most of high school and then retired it to the closet shelf.That pocketbook had marked a rite of passage for me into the world of adult accessories, and I couldn't bring myself to throw it away. My fisherman's basket pocketbook remained in the closets of my life in college, through many moves in early marriage and into mid-life until one day when my daughter, Katharine, discovered it hiding in the closet. A grown woman about to be married to a fly fishing guide, Katharine wanted the pocketbook for a wall hanging in her home in Jackson Hold, Wyoming. she was thrilled with her find...a treasure all over again. The fisherman's basket pocketbook now has a new life, in a place of honor on the wall of Katharine's home for the world to admire again, In her dotage, this beautiful old pocketbook continues to be the envy of Katharine's friends.
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