Not Exactly What I Had in Mind Read Online Free PDF Page A

briefcase, and some papers that won’t fit into the briefcase, and a typewriter. And a book, in case you have read every novel about mad dogs haunting a seventeenth-century Scottish manse available in the airport shop. And some decongestant pills so your head cold won’t be driven into your inner ears by cabin pressure. Also eight or nine different toiletries (you can, and will, leave some of these behind and purchase replacements in a hotel shop, but you should bear in mind that they will cost $13.95 per tube).
    So if you have a king-size bed at home, you spread all these things out on it and then unzip all the zippers on your carry-on bag and spread it out alongside. Then you step back, survey the prospect, and wonder whether it might be possible just to roll the whole prospect up, mattress and all, and carry that aboard; or whether it might be possible to stay home. But no. Neither thing is possible. You have miles to go before you …
    Well, a little nap would be refreshing. There was a study in the paper the other day showing that people pack better when they are rested. But there is no room on the bed. Besides, your plane leaves in an hour and fourteen minutes, and the airport is forty minutes away, and you haven’t bought your ticket yet.
    So! Let’s get packing. First get the cat out of the socks.
    Now! Let’s get down to it.
    Say your carry-on bag is of the folded-over hanging variety, with lots of pockets. Those little pockets look easy. Put a tie in each one. You really need only one tie, but there are four of those little pockets; so put a tie in each one of them. That’s a start.
    Now. Get the cat out of the socks again.
    Now. Large hanging items. Sport coats, shirts. These must be laid carefully, smoothly, the arms folded over just so, in the large cavity where the coat hangers are.
    Where the coat hangers were.
    Where are the coat hangers?
    You find some coat hangers, but they are not the same ones that came with this bag; they are the ones that came with a previous bag that exploded in Des Moines. So they don’t quite hook on to the little hook-on thing right. So you have to bend their little hooks. And the little hook-on thing. So you know they are going to come loose.
    Still, you load several changes of clothes onto the hangers and work the whole mass somehow into the large cavity. And try to zip it up. It is like trying to zip three Serbian trappers into the same sleeping bag. So you figure you’ll get it completely zipped later, after you’ve loaded the pockets on the other side. So you turn the bag over and start loading those pockets with miscellanea. But arms are flopping out of the large cavity. So you turn the bag back over, and everything you have loaded into the pockets falls out, including the cat.
    But you get the whole thing pulled together. Oh yes, yes you do. You curse, and you kick, and you forget to put in any underwear, but you do get the whole thing pulled together. Because you are an American traveling person, and if you give up and stay home you will have to do something even worse than traveling, like straightening out your life.
    Getting your stuff together, of course, does not mean being able to lift it. You have to jettison something. Ties. That’s why we put extra ties in to begin with. Ties are easy to jettison. Jettisoning a jacket, say, would mean going back into the major cavity again, and the stuff in the major cavity has begun to swell visibly.
    Now you can lift it. You can carry it out to the car. You can drive it to the airport. And you can drag it through the parking lot and all the way to the ticket counter. And by then your bag’s contents have rearranged themselves into shifting, ill-balanced clumps that cause other travelers to stare.
    So — partly to cut down on the number of times you will lurch into walls between ticket counter and gate, and partly so that people will no longer suspect you of transporting nearly suffocated chimpanzees — you do a little