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Michael considered fate at 12:18   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

As long as I'm on the whole nostalgia kick.. I might as well talk a bit about the 'ol wallet itself.

Wallets, in my family, have always been a passing thing. They're sort of like a pair of shoes for your butt - you'd like a comfortable one, and utilitarian too - but it wouldn't hurt if it was a bit fashionable too. But the bottom line, always, was not to get too attached because you're going to get a new one in two years.. maybe sooner if your kids aren't imaginative enough when it comes Father's Day.

My first wallet came when I was in 7th grade. To be somewhat exact about it, I believe it was sometime in August when I first pick her out at Ames (or was it Sears..) and paid $12 dollars. I was at my parents camp for the summer sailing and relaxing in the sun and generally doing nothing at all but reading way too much Tom Clancy. We had taken a spin up the road to Dover-Foxcroft, Piscataquis County Seat, and home of my birthplace - Mayo Hospital. I was lumbering around the store in sullen silence as I waited for my sister and mother to finish their chore of being a woman.

And then I saw it - the wallet rack.

I played with a few of them, folding them open and closed again, fitting them into my back pocket. I was a small kid at the time so I couldn't swing the two-fold. My rear pocket wasn't nearly big enough. My personality is sort of tri-fold, anyway. I picked out a nice dark grey leather tri that had a plastic window in the middle section for the license (which I would not obtain for another three years). It didn't have the flimsy plastic picture-book slip-in that many have and I liked that. Keep it simple, I always say.

Back then $12 - especially for a 7th grader - was a princely sum but somehow I had a feeling about this wallet and I knew it was time. Time to become a man, as it were. I convinced the board (my mom) to approve my business expense and like that, I had a wallet.

At first, there wasn't much in it. Money, mostly - and even then not much. Over time it started collecting various pieces of paper and plastic, as wallets are want to do. Receipts and telephone numbers scrawled on tiny ripped pieces of paper. Loose Subway sandwich stickers and buy-one-get-one-free coupons for Dunkin Donuts. By late high school it had accumulated a driver's licence, a credit card, and even my social security card.

In my senior year I was dating a girl who lived on a lake. I beached my sailboat there for the early summer months and we would go out on the weekends and after school and enjoy the water. The wallet, however, did not like the water so much. Twice it went swimming there - once I even left it, unaware that it was drowning in the shallows. An uncle of hers rescued it a day later, setting it on the bow of the boat and I found it then - never having known it was gone. It was wet and soggy and I layed it out to sunbath. Good as new. Mostly.

Again, this time in the Quebec Laurentians, it went swimming again. This time, after a bout of skinny dipping with the good friends that one aquires in college, I left it floating by the dock. By the time I realized it was gone it was well past midnight and I was well past my 10th beer. I stumbled back down the dirt path, a bit anxious as only a drunk man can be, listening to the whoops and hollers of the drunken revalry back at the camp around the fire. I was in the dark and wadded around by the dock getting my the bottoms of my pants wet, dragging one hand around in the water as a sort of dredger - a beer bottle in the other. Again, I got lucky and found it - mostly in tact - and a few hours by the camp fire quickly returned it to good as new. Mostly.

Somewhere in there they told me it was time to get a new wallet. They said mine was ragged and tired and falling apart and that I needed to upgrade, replace, improve. HA! Little do they know of my loyalty. Little do they know of the power of my nostalgia.

This summer, in August, we reach the twelve year anniversary of the joining of me and my wallet to become one - the Man and his wallet. In honour of this most sacred of occasions and to preserve for all who follow, I present to you here a portrait of my wallet, in all it's glory, here on this day, June 19th, 2003.