Much depends on a string shopping bag...

I was wandering through the cafeteria of my school the other day supervising the eating activities of our multitudes, and one of the students called me, a lovely girl from the mountains of Vietnam, “Look!” she said, and held up the knitting she was doing.  I stopped to admire it and praise the consistency of the tension.  Next to her was Alice, a refugee by some long series of transitions, from some part of west Africa, who has never communicated much to me but shy smiles, and I remarked that as a child in Mexico, I had been taught to crochet string shopping bags.  This elicited a great burst of excitement from Alice.  She told me how all the girls in her school made shopping bags, of all colours, and how lovely and how useful they were.  They sometimes crocheted with two colours together, and competed with each other to make the most beautiful bag. “We were very proud and happy!”  I could see in her eyes the memory of her with her vanished friends, the laughter and jokes they made.  I tried not think of what she and her brothers had had to run from, only that she was here and for a moment was washed in a happy memory.

 It is a quintessentially female experience, I think, this making of bags.  I learned because I was in a Mexican school in the 50’s when boys were allowed PE, and girls allowed only the demure pastime of sitting in a classroom learning a useful skill.  I was Canadian, and while I relished and continue to relish my shopping bag making activity, I thought even then that it was silly that boys got to run around outside, shouting and playing, while we were considered…I never knew what, too weak? Or that it was unseemly for girls?

 But here was Alice, who never questioned the making of shopping bags, though it too must have come from a world where the boys were off doing something else, but loved it and the solidarity and companionship it signified with the friends she knew. She summoned up a world of colour and sunshine for me on that dreary, grey, BC day, with her smiling excitement, and we exclaimed and laughed like girls together at the memory of how we struggled with our bags.  I went away filled with gratitude for Alice, and that far-away Mexican teacher who handed me a ball of string and a crochet hook, all for this one moment of connection half a century later in a noisy Vancouver high school cafeteria.