In which Rebekah goes shopping

On the list of activities that I try to avoid whenever possible, one can find such things as

• cleaning toilets,
• submitting to blood draws, and
• walking down open staircases

but I would rather do almost any of these things than go shopping. Actually, that statement is too strong—I'll happily go shopping for food or toilet paper or pens or anything else of that ilk, since it doesn't generally seem like much of a commitment—it's the other sort of thing—clothing, stoves, houses—that invariable causes great stress. But I definitely didn't want to repeat the money belt stunt and I didn't want to keep borrowing Sapphire's purse, which is very cute for a twelve year old, but perhaps a bit off for a 39 year old with grey hair, nor did I want to be condemned to wearing the same pair of grey slacks for our two months in Europe. Besides, the purse that I had left in Illinois was rather the worse for wear, and I would certainly need to be replacing it soon in any case, and thus it was that on Friday morning I set out with Sapphire for the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés to search for what I hoped would be a purse that would make it unnecessary to repeat the expedition for many years. 

We agreed that we would start by looking at purses in at least a half dozen shops before making any decisions, in order to ensure that we ended up with something that I really liked. So we walked down the Boulevard Saint Germain, looking for shops with purses in them. We decided that we could probably eliminate from consideration any shop that sold primarily clothing, since the purses that they had on display seemed to be primarily designed to match the clothing they sold, and I was fairly certain that I wasn't going to want to be carrying a pale coral purse in five years. We eliminated any store where the purses in the windows looked like they might be made of high class plastic. And we eliminated the shop called "TeenMode" on the grounds that I haven't been a teen for a number of years. That left us with surprisingly few shops to try, but try them we did. 

There was only one shop where I found that I really liked the purses, and there we had a bit of a problem, because I suddenly realized that I hadn't really talked about cost with Blaise, and I was thinking about dropping a not insubstantial amount of credit card. (No, we're not talking about four figures here, or even the high three figures, but enough so that I could have bought a year's worth of Nutella, even at the rate that my kids go through it.) Fortunately, both of us sprang for French SIM cards for our iPhones when we got here (the perks of having an unlocked Verizon phone) and so I texted him and asked what he thought my budget should be. 

"Dunno." Well, that wasn't very helpful, so I persisted. 

"Whatever you feel comfortable with." Given how much I hate shopping, and how much my budgetary instincts are still tied to assistant professor of philosophy salaries at Kansas State, that would be about 10€, and I might feel guilty about that, given that I have a functional, if rather crappy looking, purse sitting on the counter at home. I mean, I could just color the parts where the fake leather has peeled away from its fabric backing with black sharpie, and use it for another couple of years. I point out that I could easily be talking about 300€ or more. More texts come in.

"I spent $200+ on my shoes." That's better, since it gives me some sort of pricing idea.

"If you get one that's well made and that you like, you'll use it every day for probably ten years. Maybe more." He has a point.

"The purse you got with my mom when you were pregnant with Sapphire was $80, and it was tiny and it still lasted you better than a decade." I had forgotten about that. 

I was feeling somewhat better about buying a purse now, and so we headed back into the store and began to look more closely at the purses. There was one that I really liked the style of, but it was burnt orange, and another that Sapphire really liked, but I thought that white with gold embellishments might not be good in the winter. And then we saw, over on the other side of the store, the purse that I had liked, but in black rather than burnt orange. We headed over and I picked it up. The leather was butter soft; the purse was simple. I liked it. I took it over to the window to see it better. I liked it better. I looked at the price tag. It was better than I had feared it might be. And so I took a deep breath, and bought it, which means that I am now the proud owner of an Italian leather handbag, which, I might add, has proved large enough to carry a picnic for four to the museum, at least if everyone carries his or her own water bottle!