Sadness for Our Times

Today, my cousin found that she had lost a certain bright-green middle-sized suitcase she'd been planning to take on a trip, and descended into a near-inconsolable sorrow. "I lost my baby" she told me, because to the young adult of today's mobile and transient society, the suitcase is one's closest companion: child in the sense of carrying the contents of its parent's life, parent in the sense of giving birth to our lives when we reach a new place, brother or sister in its reliable companionship.

Reliable, that is, until it gets misplaced.

My cousin hugs the refrigerator--comforting, she tells me, because like her lost suitcase it is square--and wonders, in the absence of her native suitcase, where in this big crazy world she belongs.