Mom’s purse held a world of joys, hopes and surprises

I used to think my mother’s purse carried the whole world.

She had the basics: billfold, leaky ballpoint pens, roll of lint-covered Certs.

But there were always odd surprises: somebody’s report card, a limp egg salad sandwich, thick wads of stuck-together Gold Bond stamps.

We used to joke that she should be on “Let’s Make a Deal.” There was a recurring bit on that 1970s-era game show where host Monty Hall would pick a woman out of the audience and have her go on a treasure hunt in her purse. Box of dental floss? Expired library card? Diaper pin? If the contestant had such things in her purse, she’d win a prize.

Once, Hall famously offered a lady $50 if she had a boiled egg in her purse. We just about fell over. Of course Mom had a boiled egg in her purse! It was a week after Easter and she’d probably forgotten she had hidden one in there. (Though, truth be told, she might have been carrying a boiled egg regardless of the season. Somebody might want a boiled egg. You never know.)

My mother’s purse wasn’t necessarily practical. She never seemed to have aspirin or Band-Aids or a quarter for the meter.

Her purse was stuffed with things she might never need but that, for whatever her reason, she felt compelled to keep with her: a sprinkle of beach glass; a torn-out article from the newspaper that she meant to read; a bracelet with a broken clasp that needed to be taken to Ogawa jewelry for repair (that bracelet rode in her purse for years, even as she drove her black ’64 Chevelle past Ogawa jewelry day after day); pills for the dog that she kept in her purse to remind herself to give the dog his pill (and to separate those pills from the medications in the house so that nobody mistakenly took the dog’s pill); a mangled piece of paper with the license plate number of a car that may or may not have committed a hit-and-run against a chicken several months back — if there was to be a trial, she was willing to testify as a witness.

The purse was never a designer brand, unless it was something she found at a garage sale, and it was always stuffed to overflowing and vaguely smelling of Juicy Fruit gum. Over the years, printouts from my father’s doctors replaced the report cards, pictures of grandchildren were shuffled in with pictures of saints like a well-worn deck of cards, and her own medications took up a pocket next to the dog’s pills. She carried bills she had already paid and letters she hadn’t finished writing. She always carried a sandwich in case she got hungry. Or in case anybody she met was hungry. Or in case somebody’s dog was hungry. You never know, and she wanted to help.

My mother, Dorothy Ferreira Cataluna, died last week. She was 81. She did not have her purse by her side during her last weeks. She was so sick. She hoped the people she loved would go forward and carry their own things. Like many moms in my mom’s generation, she liked the proof of things she could hold in her hands, the hard comfort of carrying the weight of her world on her arm, and the joy of feeding any little hungry person or animal that came along.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.