Luggage Baggage

“Howard, this isn’t our suitcase!” I called to my husband after I had opened a near look-alike bag belonging to our daughter-in-law. We were unpacking after they had picked us up at the Amtrak station in Ft. Worth. They were in the area on an anniversary trip and would take us to Houston with them for a visit at their home. My husband brought me another bag, and as I started to unzip it, I thought it looked unfamiliar, too.

“This is not our suitcase, either! You must have gotten the wrong luggage at the train station!” I wailed. He examined it and agreed he’d never seen it before. All kinds of alarm bells were going off in my head. His medicine and all his clothes were in the smallish bag I’d purposely chosen for easy luggage handling. (I’d learned my lesson about cumbersome suitcases over Christmas.)

Taking charge, our son said, “I think I can take care of the medicine,” getting ready to call his father-in-law, a pharmacist. Then another thought hit me. My computer was in there! My other brain! Just then we saw a luggage tag with a name under a plastic cover.

“Let me call them,” Jamie said, trying to calm us down. He called the number, which was in our home town, saying, “I think we have your luggage!” He was met with a confused response: no, she had not taken a trip; no she was not at Amtrak. Then she asked if we had opened the bag. I ran to do so, hating to again look in someone else’s luggage. The inner lining was neatly zipped. I opened it, looked, and there was a computer. And Howard’s clothes!

“I’m sorry, it’s our luggage,” I heard Jamie say over the phone in a shame-faced voice, then in the next breath, yelling, “You guys are something else!” My mind whirling, I remembered it was a bag I had bought at a garage sale a few years before and it had been in the back of the closet, rarely used. I hadn’t recognized the leather trim that made it look so unfamiliar, and in the dim light of the bedroom, the color seemed different.

We all convulsed with laughter and relief, everyone talking at once. Howard hadn’t remembered the bag, either, and had no idea where it had come from, so it was all my fault. But who cares? All’s well that ends well (which of course won’t happen until we’re safely home again). But, despite a few earlier scrapes that day, God had kept us safe as always.