My Old Backpack

I’m saying goodbye to an old friend–my trusty gray backpack. It seems silly to make such a connection to an inanimate object, but as my wife says, “Never take the love of an inanimate object for granted.”

It’s one of my wife’s maxims. Certainly that was the case when my kids were younger. My son Asher had a blue blanket that he clung to so much he ripped it to shreds, but at 2 years old, he still held onto those shreds when we went on an airplane ride. Unfortunately, being two, he tended to throw his stuff around (actually, he still does), and then we couldn’t find it when we had to leave the aircraft. He cried for hours and it took a while.

Mind you, my kids still have their stufties (when did that become the accepted term?) and sleep with them every night. But although they’d feel sadness at their departure, it wouldn’t be a big crying fit.

My backpack and I have shed blood together, we’ve travelled over many miles, and hauled my weight all across Arizona. I had to order it special because most backpacks can’t hold my colossal 18″ screen laptop. (This is not a humble brag–my job has a lot of video production, so it was either get a gaming computer or an Apple. Since I don’t like Apple computers, there ya go.) It didn’t just hold my computer–it held everything. The mouse, the power plug, the flash drives, the spare change I liberated for extra cash, the plastic forks which come in handy at the strangest of times, and the paper copy of Sudoku when you don’t wanna use the app on your phone.

It was with me when the brakes fails on my bicycle, went caroming into the pavement, and broke my shoulder. So when one of its zippers broke, I didn’t abandon it. I just adjusted how and what I carried. However, time is the great equalizer, and soon it was two, then three zippers broken. I still carried this backpack through even when the main reason for using it–the laptop pouch–broke its zipper. I looped a bit of rope with a lark’s head knot and kept it in place.

When the last zipper broke, though, that was the end. It simply couldn’t hold anything. For a while, I just shoved my stuff into a supermarket bag and carried it, but I finally accepted I needed a new backpack. So I bought the exact same model, so I knew exactly where to shove everything, but even when I got it in the mail… it still took a week before I deigned to open the package and transfer everything. It seemed wrong to do that to my backpack, but my backpack understood–it couldn’t keep working.

I wish I could have given it a Viking burial, but that would have taken me getting some gasoline, hiring some reenactors, and give the speech from The 13th Warrior. But in the end, I simply dumped it in the garbage. I’m sure its successor will serve me just as well, and considering it’s silent right now, I’m sure that means he agrees. 🙂

Do you take the love of an inanimate object for granted? Do you treat your car with love or is it simply a tool? Is the keyboard you’re using have a certain style or is it interchangeable? Let me know in the comments below!