The Case of the Mysterious Blue Suitcases

Where did they come from? What is in them? True story.

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This week, two blue vinyl suitcases were left on the porch.  They were wrapped in duct tape, two silver stripes around each, and ended in a thumbnail-sized tape lump to keep the zipper tabs together. The suitcases were classic pre-wheels, just typical 1970s, big buckled affairs offering Soviet utility, lacking pretence and probably not even knowing what pretence was. I had yet to learn where they came from; my address was on the Canada Post labels. While I remembered such suitcases growing up, I assumed they were misdelivered by a rushed early morning lost airline baggage deliverer.  But the luggage tag tugged into a vinyl sleeve carried my late mother’s still familiar handwriting.  

 I called my brother in Winnipeg; they were meant for me. 

Long before my dad died a little over a year ago, he had taken over my childhood room. He could not return to the bed he had shared with his wife, and my brother was now emptying the bedroom drawers.  My brother said it was a mix of papers, old school projects that parents keep, photos, and other flotsam. 

On the recent first anniversary of my dad’s death - I’m sorry, I will not say passing; there is still some Dylan Thomas rage in me - my daughter and I flew out to Calgary, rented a car and drove to the graveyard in Vulcan, AB to put flowers on his grave. His modest grave was a flat marker, though you and you couldn’t tell if it was a graveyard or sideroad when covered with snow.  But with windshield scrapers and our feet, we found it.  

If grief was a giant gas-filled balloon hanging over me, surely that had let out some of its stench.

But even when I opened the blue suitcase, I felt a shudder of grief.  Or, if I were continuing the stench simile, I would say I gagged. 

The contents were in brown manila envelopes, each marked with small notes my dad would write long before post-it notes existed;  it was mostly schoolwork and letters from when I was away in France; he had kept them all. 

There was a metal tin with a taped note from Dad, “Keepsakes.”  It’s been a long time since I heard anyone say “keepsakes.”  Inside were spools of thread and a pencilled note from his mother talking about her mother that read, “Where mum stopped her sewing.  Don’t break the thread. 1922.” Grandma had been gone almost forty years, and her handwriting was still familiar. 

I found a faded, stiff red canvas pencil case commemorating the 1939 visit of George III and Elizabeth to Canada; the zipper was stuck and had probably been that way for 60 years. My school papers returned me to the third grade, each covered with pale blue Gestetner rubric sheets and the teacher’s red-inked comments. It has been so many years, but I remember every project and paper.  And so many grades that were not As. 

Assuming my father or I  had discarded the worst efforts, my straight-A student days narrative I’d offered up so frequently for my poor daughter seemed more myth than reality.  

Birthday cards I had given to him, homemade constructions, bright, cheery, full of crayon red balloons, and exclamation marks. Photos of my daughter as a baby, my son as a toddler, cards they had sent their grandfather. 

old cards and mementos

The second suitcase is stuffed with a mix of my father’s mementoes of me and my insufferably bad poetry and bad stories published in a student literary guide that must have been looking to fill space. The poetry is rife with teenage emotion; it should be seasoned with salt. It was like the Dead Sea.  

(I should have included some of it)

There was one neatly folded piece of paper, a typewritten mathematical theorem my dad, the mathematician, the man whose work nobody in the family could understand, must have written; but on the back, a blue and orange rocket ship or long-legged bird, undoubtedly drawn when I was with him in his university faculty lounge.  A wood carving of an old car, carved by my uncle of sorts, his first cousin, an Albertan farmer who I remember being able to fix and build anything.  My fleeting memory of meeting Bobby Hull was accurate. The signature is on a folded piece of paper within a brown envelope my dad had marked for me.  I only remember watching Hull’s toupee coming off at a game at the old Winnipeg Arena.  And my parents kept a clipping of my hair that I had never seen.  And a script. In grade two, I practised for two months; I was Dirty Walt of the Peatbog.  My dad kept it. Even now, the lines are familiar.  

I am unsure if the blue suitcase’s contents will mean much to my children when they are old.  The attachments are mine; they may remind them that their father was once young.

But some memories, some momentoes, should not be indulged as they give grief a lead role it doesn’t deserve.  I moved a brass miniature phonograph and the carved wooden car to the fireplace mantle.  But the heavy blue suitcases will be buckled and put under the staircase. 

Please subscribe and get at least three pieces /essays per week with open comments. It’s $5 per month and less than $USD 4. I know everyone says hey, it’s just a cup of coffee (with me, not per day but just one per month), but if you’re like me, you go, “Hey, I only want so many cups of coffee!” I get it. I don’t subscribe to many here because I can’t afford it.

But I only ask that when you choose your coffee, please choose mine. Cheers.

_______________________________________________