I know we can take it, if our love is a strong one

At first glance, my wallet looks much like the one my father had when I was growing up.  The shiny black leather is cracked across the outside, and rectangles or circles have been pressed into it where I carry business cards and such.  Some seams have gone green either with age or envy for those of its ken that get to carry more.  One corner has worn down to the point that any bills or receipts inside come poking out like a flash of ankle from a Gibson girl.  Not that the wallet is doing much to conceal its contents, what with the way the stressed leather goes flapping open.

This should make it easy to share my credentials were it not for the lousy finish on that driver’s license I had one or two times back.  Now there is a shadowy ghost of myself on the cover of my identification making true recognition hard for a stranger unless I choose to reveal more.  But such revelation means removal and I am never comfortable until I am back where I belong.  That is, in my wallet with my credit cards and business cards and customer cards and insurance cards and social security card.  (Yes, I carry my social security card and it is, in fact, laminated.  I also tear labels from mattresses when the moon is in Aquarius.)

But of course it is not really me in there, that wallet.  It’s just the me I carry around to show other people who don’t know me yet.  I used to have a bigger, very impractical, also back wallet in which I carried myself from high school until almost exactly ten years ago.  My Sweet Lady convinced me to give it up in a Tangier Outlet mall somewhere outside of Savannah.  It was an early, though oft repeated, experience of being disappointed with the dearth of bargains at the bargain center.  Standing in the Coach store, she convinced me that paying a little more for quality to would be worth it in the long run.  Ten years later, looking at my wallet and thinking of how we bought it on our honeymoon, I know she is still right.