Old Wallet Sparks Memories

Rummaging through drawers looking for something, I often encounter my old, no-longer-used wallet. I hold it,feeling the soft leather.  I explore each compartment.  Perhaps I am going to find something overlooked; maybe a ten-spot. But, mainly, I just reminisce.  Where once so many little things were stored waiting to be a part of my life, there is nothing but a dusky odour and a crinkled emptiness.

I have much the same feeling of being in a large arena where after the crowd has gone and the noise and excitement of the big game is history.  It occurs to me now that when in use, I never gave Wallet a second thought, unless I had misplaced it.  Only then would I realize my dependency on this taken-for-granted-item;  something like a flicking-the switch-and-the-light-doesn't-come-on-sensation.

Wallet and I first met in October, 1945.  Just discharged from the airforce I was anticipating my return to civilian life.  It was easier to purchase some of the niceties of life in the United States immediately after the wars end.  I had a wartime pen-pal to meet in Everett, Washington.  So it was a case of two-birds-with-one-stone-caper and I found myself in an Everett department store.

I bought a new suit, shirt, tie, shoes and the best wallet I could find.  Of soft Russian calf, it snuggled in its neat little box in company with a $12 price tag - a lot for a wallet in those days.  "What the hell," I said to myself.  I was free from the service and living it up.  I not only bought it, I I had my initials embossed in gold on the inside: KHS.

One of Wallet's first occupants was an Unemployment Insurance Commission I.D. card, #A508567, and for a brief period I carried my old National Registration Regulations 1940, Registration Certificate, dated August 19, 1940.  This was a wartime measure and everyone had to register.  My own identity card was another early occupant along with the few remaining dollars I had at the time.  I slipped Wallet into my pocket and together we set out on our post-war life.

Back in Victoria I met a girl named Lynette and on our first date Wallet shared the experience when i withdrew the bills to pay the cashier at the old Dominion Theatre on Yates Street.

Later, Wallet accepted Lynette's photograph and, when we looked at rings in Francis' Jewelers, Wallet was again present.  Wallet went with us when we walked down the aisle of the old, long-gone St. Aidan's Church, once at Richmond and Cedar Hill Cross Road.

When Lynette and I left on our honeymoon, Wallet was fat and bulging with money and tickets, but thin and much lighter on our return.

Wallet shared with me my employment at the post office and held secure within its folds my record of documentation.  

As my life progressed how well I remember the visits to the hospital Wallet and I made when Lynette and I added children to our family, and then the return trips to EMERGENCY with their sicknesses and broken bones, and later the death of my father and mother.  Wallet was always there, some little compartment ready to divulge information required by the admitting office.

While travelling and, on visits to the dentist, doctor, lawyer or grocer, Wallet has always been there when required.

       Transferred from suit to suit, the comforting pressure of Wallet's presence next to my body has always been a silent message of reassurance; each of its compartments a link with the world and some segment of society.  

Thousands of times I have put in or taken out something that has been a part of my life.  Wallet has accepted new occupants; birth certificates - driver's licence - credit cards - library card - club memberships - spare key for the car - pictures of grandchildren and the many ever-present notes and phone numbers reminding me to do this or that.

For short periods of time Wallet contained Sweepstake and later Lotto tickets,  a promise of hope that one day my 'ship' would come in - and the very short-term occupants those transient dollar bills.  When I count back it staggers me to realize Wallet has been the guardian of tens of thousands of dollars folded and warm within the soft Russian calf.

Seven decades later Wallet and I have become a little worn and wrinkled.  Wallet is no longer in use, but I can't part with this link with my past.  Now resting in the back of a drawer Wallet [now retired], would appear to be empty should a stranger encounter it, and I must admit I too had always looked at it in that way, but no, like the empty arena after the big game, the feeling is there, the sensation that something has happened here.  It is an emotional feeling because it represents a large slice of my life.  

The next time I encounter Wallet while rummaging, I won't see it as being empty.  It will be full - full of memories.