Long before they added mom and dad to their life descriptions, my parents took separate journeys that defined them as much as any experience in their lives. I learned about these excursions not from talking to them or reading letters tucked into a desk drawer, but by rummaging through luggage consigned to a storage closet.
The Samsonite suitcases that belonged to my mother were vintage early-1950s with two-tone exteriors, metal locks and fittings, and her initials monogrammed underneath the cases’ leather handles.
My grandparents bought the luggage as a set with a large travel suitcase, smaller overnight case, and a squat, rectangular vanity case. The suitcases’ interiors were lined with maroon satin and the vanity had a little mirror inside the case lid.
In my mind, I see my mother standing on a train platform in her small Colorado hometown, dark eyes matching her hair, which is pulled back in a conservative bun. She kisses my tearful grandmother and taciturn grandfather goodbye as a porter lifts the Samsonites onto a luggage cart.
One state line and 282 miles away, my father is engaged in the same task my mother undertook in preparation for living away from home for months. He condenses his life as a middling student, decent trumpeter, and star football player and runner into a travel trunk.
He has been instructed to pack light — all his clothing needs from topcoat to shoes will be issued to him once he reaches his destination. He packs a few books, sneaks in a pack of cigarettes and, when he isn’t looking, my grandmother tucks a loaf of homemade Norwegian holiday bread into the trunk: He won’t be coming home for Christmas.
The train trip from Fort Morgan to Boston takes almost three days. My mother has a small sleeping compartment she shares with a girl who boarded the train in Denver. The girl disembarks in St. Louis and an older woman becomes my mother’s roommate. As the train rolls through the Midwest, the woman offers my mother sips from her “traveling flask,” which my mother politely declines.
My father’s fellow travelers on the bus headed east are farmers, ranchers and traveling salesmen. He meets a couple guys his age and they play Texas hold ’em and occasionally make fun of a woman reading a Bible aloud two rows behind them.
The station wagon she climbs into at Boston’s South Station is already packed with girls her age. The driver adds the Samsonites to luggage precariously piled on the car’s roof and she cranes her neck to stare at the city’s buildings as the other girls rattle off their hometowns and compare travel experiences.
Dawn breaks cold and cobalt blue as the bus pulls away in a cloud of diesel fumes, leaving him alone in the parking lot standing next to the trunk and wondering when his ride will arrive.
I can count on one hand the number of times my mother talked about attending Wellesley College and my father recounted his experiences at Kemper Military School in Missouri.
My grandparents’ small town conservative values and, maybe, homesickness proved too strong a magnet not to pull my mother back home. But her time at Wellesley reinforced the self-confidence she nurtured even before boarding the train and convinced her she could carve her own path into a life that became defined by civic service.
Kemper did not propel my father into a military career. But it tempered his reputation as a small-town kid with a quick mind and a knack for finding trouble into a man who knocked down one challenge after another in his life like bowling pins.
The time has come in my life when objects freighted with memory, like my mother’s Samsonites and my father’s trunk, are destined for a dumpster or the Goodwill bin.
I feel like the talismans of my past and the tethers connecting me to my parents are becoming unmoored and frayed to the breaking point. My wife knows this change upsets me. She tells me the memories will remain after the touchstones lining the path from my life to my parents — books, art, luggage, clothes — are gone.
I know she’s right, but I would like to open that Samsonite vanity case one more time and catch the scent of the perfume my mother wore so long long ago.
