The Straggler: Conversion Experience.

I grew up believing there were only two kinds of luggage: trunks and suitcases. The old style of steamer trunk was still around in my salad days (the 1960s). I actually took one with me when I left home to go to college. It was a glorious thing, a relic from the heroic age of luggage, the kind of Victorian monster that Henry Morton Stanley might have lost fording a river. It was strictly an item for porters and redcaps to deal with, though. For stuff one carried oneself, the suitcase was the thing.

Wheels were beginning to make an appearance, and some avant-garde spirits could occasionally be seen tugging a suitcase with a pair of wheels stuck on one corner, the tugging being accomplished by dint of a strap attached at the diametrically opposite corner. This was an unhappy and unstable contraption, an unimaginative hybrid like those early digital watches where the rectangular display of numbers was imbedded in a traditional circular watch face. I never bothered with it, and schlepped a series of suitcases and shoulder bags across three continents over 30 years.

The best of them was my Saks bag. Leaving New York to get married abroad in 1986, and perhaps with the mind to have one last bachelor fling before the curtain came down on my days of reckless spending, I went to Saks Fifth Avenue and bought a disgracefully expensive bag. It was, and still is, a robust yet beautiful thing, expandable to twice its width via some clever zipper work, with a dog-clipped padded webbing strap to attach for shoulder carrying. In un-expanded state, it is precisely the right size to fit into those wooden boxes they set up near airport check-in counters, to test whether your bag is too big for carry-on. This one looks as though it ought to be; but it has survived all challenges, and seen me through this recent era in which it has come to be thought an essential life skill for a person, traveling alone, to manage with only carry-on luggage.

Meanwhile, wheelie technology was advancing steadily. That early unhappy style of suitcase with attached wheels had been superseded by the first true wheelies: bags built on a wheeled frame with an extending handle, so you could walk along upright while pulling the thing. I was not tempted. For one thing, it was mainly women that used wheelies, and older women in particular -- wheelies seemed to go with tweed suits and sensible shoes. I felt sure that whatever the French noun for "wheelie" was, it took the article la, not le. A man needed no assistance from one-inch wheels. He hefted his suitcase or shoulder bag stoically, even if he had to lean over at 40[degrees] from the vertical to do so.

I did not know then that over quite large areas of human life, women are what the advertising industry refers to as "early adopters." In his WW2 memoir Quartered Safe Out Here, George MacDonald Fraser notes the common soldiers' prejudice against filter-tip cigarettes, at that time quite a new thing. "That's a tart's cigarette, man!" scoffed a comrade when GMF produced one. I can recall a parallel opinion about automatic transmissions when they first appeared. Only a woman would seek that degree of separation from the raw, the real, the mechanical (went the prejudice); men drove stick shifts. Well, pretty soon men were driving automatics, puffing on filter-tip cigarettes as they did so.

So it was with wheelies. I took my whole family off to China for the summer of 2001. By that time I had already seen men pulling wheelies. Not dubious ...