A woman named Patricia Reid was recently profiled in the New York Times. She has been unemployed for four years. Before being cut loose in massive layoffs, she worked for two decades as an internal auditor and analyst at Boeing. The biggest fear for this 57-year-old college graduate? “Becoming a bag lady.”
“Bag lady” is my generation’s term for “homeless old woman with everything she owns stuffed in two big shopping bags.” It is a position that women, regardless of age, marital status, employment or resources, fear. It summons up visions of a “living death,” of tottering down a grimy street pushing a shopping cart, dragging our eco-friendly cloth shopping bags crammed to their cloth brim with fat-free cookies, a blanket with a torn satin edging, a stuffed animal, flannel pajamas and unread copies of supermarket tabloids. Don’t laugh. I asked several women just exactly what they envisioned would be IN those bags. That’s what they told me they thought they might need if they wanted to pass the night on the street in comfort. Obviously they’ve never given serious thought to what it truly means to be homeless.
I’ve found that for the middle-to-upper class, “bag lady” is a euphemistic way of saying “homeless.” It conveys slightly more pity than “homeless” because the stereotype doesn’t include addiction of any kind, only the sheer, oppressing poverty that frightens middle-aged women living in suburbia (and maybe a little mental illness). “Bag lady” is a step above homeless because it seems more like a specter in the night than a real possibility.
Soldiers in Iraq are packing up their rucksacks, turning in their Kevlar and helmets, cleaning their guns, and piling into C-130 aircraft to fly home. On the long flight home many of the soldiers will pass the time on the flight talking about all the things they are going to do when they get home. Some will get married, many will start a family, go back to school, lay on the beach. Soldiers will salivate talking about grilling a steak with corn on the cob and washing it down with an ice-cold beer. There will be as many “when I get back home plans” as there are soldiers.