My son is leaving for Spain and Ireland in a few days–he’ll be gone about five weeks and while he kinda sorta knows where he’s going to go and what he’s going to do, he mostly has no idea where he might go or what he plans to do. He’s been there before several times and for extended periods of time. He’ll be fine (though he’s been warned about the heat, the surface of the sun that is current day Spain on the Meseta). He’s got one relatively small orange duffel bag. That’s it. Everything gets shoved in there. It works for him

Carrying just one bag used to work for me, actually, though mine was a backpack I carried for years, from Mexico through Massachusetts and well into Pennsylvania. My second favorite though was a black satchel I’d throw over my shoulder and carry from Russia to Ireland and Prague, and western New York. I liked having it with me since my important information, journals, and more were in there, but I also liked not having to carry it by hand leaving my arms and hands free. It also hung at my side which was more secure than on my back like a “take what you want” gift shop. We get used to bags, to luggage, to wallets and storage containers and just the right pockets in our winter coat we wear every day to the point where it becomes as much a storage area for our daily items as the junk drawer in the kitchen. My favorite was an Osprey backpack I carried from southern France to the Atlantic coast of Spain on the Camino de Santiago. For one summer everything I could possibly need was in that bag. It still is.

I still use a tan messenger style bag like the old black one, and every once in a while I dump it on the bed or the floor and go through the papers and envelopes and other crap I shoved in there without thinking. Matchbooks and old cards, some flyers from an art gallery, a KitKat bar. I dump it all out and trash as much as possible, pull my list pad out of a front pocket, rewrite the list on the next page of the notebook and throw away the pages accidently bent back from bouncing around the bottom of the bag. I rewrite the list and tuck it neatly back inside until I rewrite it in a few weeks, I put my school keys and ID back in an interior zipped pocket, and if I’m feeling ambitious, I’ll vacuum it out, wipe it clean.

I’m carrying less these days, and mostly stopped lugging around either a backpack or satchel. The brown bag goes with me to readings and come the fall to classes at the college. I don’t even carry a wallet most of the time. I stopped hauling books everywhere and I’ve found it better to not make notes while I’m out and simply wait until I get home to write observations or thoughts, make connections between a gull I watched this morning and something someone once said to me about birds on my porch and the passing of time. I’ve come to prefer to put some distance between the experience and my work, sometimes hours, sometimes weeks or months, sometimes two or three lifetimes during which I pick up and put back down even more luggage filled with nonsense I thought I needed but turned out I only needed it briefly.

Often I become so engrossed in something that I want to hold it close forever, for a while anyway. Eventually, though, we move it to the side to make room for more, and at some point we take it out of the bag altogether. For instance, for some time I carried a letter my friend Fr Dan had written me. I had it for six or eight weeks, more. I read it from time to time since it was the last one he ever wrote me just days before his passing. I just couldn’t bring myself to take it out and leave it somewhere other than with me. That was almost two years ago this week. Now the letter is in a stack of his letters behind my desk here at Aerie. It sits on a notebook filled one weekend I spent alone at the retreat Fr Dan founded on New York’s Southern Tier. Eventually, it will become a book I’ve been toying with since then, called These Days, and I’ll dedicate it to my friend’s memory and infectious laugh, and then I’ll be able to move the letters and journal further away from my reach, in a drawer somewhere. I find that drawers and cabinets are simply backpacks and satchels too big to lug around.

My first car, an old light blue Chevy Monza, used to be my baggage, and I filled that thing for two hundred thousand miles across the country, through Mexico where it carried several thousand blankets to Arizona, and Canada, then throughout my years in New England, and eventually Pennsylvania, where even there it held everything I owned and I never felt like I needed anything.

I’m carrying too much these days, from books to notebooks to letters and small stones and shells. But not on me, no. I leave my brown bag at home and usually don’t even carry my phone anymore. The list of items I want close to me has faded, and the people I used to call on a regular basis have all faded as well. Lately I find myself back in the moment, observing peacefully without the need to gather anything. That stuff only takes up room. Instead I prefer to simply remember, my mind a makeshift backpack with perfectly stored stuff, like a stack of homemade gift certificates my son made through the years–“homemade loaf of bread,” “lunch and a hike of your choosing,” “automatic win at chess to be used when you are losing bad.” I’ll always have them. Even if they get lost, I’ll always have them. Videos of my mom, golf and lunch with my dad, and trips to Spain, to Siberia, to all the state parks in Virginia, to boat rides on the creeks of the Chesapeake with my son. Time might steal some of their color, but I know what they are. That doesn’t fade.

I keep my hands and arms free these days, ready to hold someone else’s hand, ready to embrace. I miss people, their laughs, their sly look when we both know what the other is thinking, the songs we shared, I miss the random text or call. Better then to not carry my phone under some illusion it will ring, and better still to simply leave my bag at home. If I see something worth remembering, I’ll remember to tell you what I saw, just like I’ll remember to tell those I love I love them before they move on from this world. And if I forget to for some reason, well, I’ll carry that with me too.