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This may be when you really notice it. You’re getting ready to leave for a Christmas party and head to the designated bag drawer to grab one of those sturdy string-handled shopping bags to carry the dinner rolls or the grab bag gifts but this time, something’s different. The bag drawer actually slides open without getting jammed. The stash looks depleted. You go through what’s there and decide just to hand-carry everything, even if it takes a couple of trips back to the car. Nice shopping bags aren’t as easy to give away anymore.
Honolulu’s new ban on bags hasn’t been a total ban. For a fee, one can get a nice shopping bag marked with the store’s logo to carry a fancy aloha shirt or sparkly party dress from the shopping mall to the car. But then, that purchased bag becomes more valuable, less likely to be used for carrying sap-sticky mangoes to the neighbor’s house or left behind at a party without a second thought.
Dalton Sue, retired teacher, recently discovered a trove of extra-precious shopping bags, many from stores that no longer exist, tucked away all through the house by his wwife, who died last year. It was something she did without any of the family really noticing.
“My wife, Ellarene, kept her bags everywhere — they were carefully folded and laid nicely — in drawers, the back of the closet, on her dresser, and most recently when the girls and I were going on a trip, I wondered how come this luggage was so heavy if it was empty? Well, in the outside luggage pocket there were bags.”
Some of the bags were brought home from mainland trips, but there were others from the days when Ala Moana Center had stores like Andrade’s, Ethel’s, Ritz, Ross Sutherland’s, Ed & Don’s, Watumull’s, Kramer’s, Petland, Sears, and Liberty House. All of them were made of good-quality paper, sturdy but biodegradable, reusable many times over, and up to modern environmental sensibilities though made decades ago.
“Ellarene’s favorite bags came from Liberty House — they were sturdy, made with good quality paper, and kept their color,” Sue said.
Oh those vintage Liberty House bags. There are people all over these islands who keep the blue-and-white, or the older pink-and-gold LH bags like family heirlooms. Nobody is going to be quick to give those away, so if you get a Christmas present or a clutch of backyard avocados that arrives on your doorstep in a vintage bag, that is an indication of the sincerity of the gift and the aloha from the giver.
As Sue put it, remembering his wife, “She shared cookies and cakes, but the bag it came in also told you how much she appreciated your friendship.”
Sue pared down the huge bag stash his wife had collected, but he kept some of the best ones as mementos of the old stores and the way they treated local customers, and in memory of Ellarene and all the folks like her who knew long before any bag bans or public awareness campaigns of the value of a reusable shopping bag.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
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