Valises. What are they?
That is the question I found myself pondering this morning while Koko sat atop my vintage Louis Vuitton trunk—a trunk I acquired, incidentally, through the Klingenschoen Fund as a legitimate archival storage expense—and stared at me with an intensity that can only be described as oracular. He knows something about valises that we do not. He always does.
Valises are bags. They are used for carrying things. People have used them for years. Why? Because things need to be carried. Is this not obvious? And yet, how rarely we stop to consider the valise. I am stopping now, and you are welcome.
My moustache began to tingle as I typed that last paragraph, which tells me there is more to this subject than meets the eye. There usually is, here in Pickax, where just last Tuesday a man was found bludgeoned behind the Hotel Booze with nothing but an empty valise beside him. The fourth such incident this quarter. But I digress. What does one pack in a valise? Clothes. Books, perhaps. Yum Yum once climbed inside mine and I nearly transported her to Lockmaster County, which would have been a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, as she is irreplaceable and also someone might have tried to keep her. People covet my cats. I have noticed this.
Some valises are expensive. Mine was not, technically, because it was donated to the fund and then redistributed to me for column research purposes, which my accountant assures me is perfectly standard. Do I spend my own money on luggage? Absolutely not. Why would I? Have you seen what they charge for birdseed in this county? The squirrels eat half of it anyway. Thieves, every one of them.
Koko just knocked a book off the shelf. It was *Death of a Salesman.* The salesman carried valises. Coincidence? My moustache says otherwise. Koko is trying to tell me something—something about travel, about mortality, about the seventy-three unsolved crimes that have occurred within a five-block radius of wherever I happen to be living. But that is a column for another day, assuming I feel generous enough to write one.
Valises.
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