This week I’ve been using a most unusual pocketbook. It is made of folded-up plastic Coca-Cola labels woven together.
It’s not at all my style. To pull off carrying this crazy patterned bag, I’ve been dressing in dark solid colors.
This Coca-Cola-label bag brings me back to a newspaper article I wrote in 2010. For some reason, it was one of my favorite articles I’ve ever done, and that’s quite a ranking, because I’ve been fortunate enough to have had all sorts of amazing and incredible things to write about.
The late Ricky Peters of Axton made all sorts of things out of potato chip bags, exactly like this pocketbook I’m carrying. The decorative picture frame he gave me is still on display in my office.
There was just something touchingly sweet about how earnest and dedicated Ricky was about his potato chip bag craft.
That spirit is inspiring. Most people just bumble along in life, passively accepting whatever endless feed of television shows or mind-dulling social media addictions the world puts in their paths. A few people blaze their own trails to energetically pursue a passion, and I guess that’s why I liked Ricky.
He had that spark to pursue a specialty.
The things Ricky made included vases, purses, jewelry boxes, CD cases, model rocking chairs, and even a briefcase and a full-sized, old-fashioned well for his mother’s front yard.
To make things, Ricky cleaned the bags, folded them around strips of paper and wove them together with fishing line. That well, he told me, took 4,598 bags and 646 hours to make.
Ricky cheerfully told me he learned and honed his craft while he was in jail. He saw that Doritos had won an award for having the best Super Bowl commercial. He was impressed by the snack food company’s initiative in creating a great commercial.
At the time, the back of the Doritos bag said, “Do something.” It inspired Ricky, who decided that he “would do something different that nobody’s done before.”
I don’t know what level of dedication and thrill for the craft Rigoberto had when he made that pocketbook out of Coca-Cola labels, in the exact style Ricky made things out of potato chip bags.
He is not around to ask.
I met Rigo in the late 1990s when he was a fun-loving, energetic little boy, in the remote mountain village of San Rafael deep in the Sierra of Mexico.
I used to go there for long spells of time each year, and I’ve kept up with dozens of those children, who are now middle-aged adults.
There were six children in that family. They all lived in one hut with a dirt floor. On the rare occasions anyone came across money (for there were no jobs there), their alcoholic father drank it all. Their mother was usually elsewhere. Other women in the village, who often didn’t have enough to feed their own children, took turns feeding those six kids.
When I’d visit the village, those six children spent a lot of time with me, and of course, we had our meals together. Rigoberto was a spark of joy.
The year I went for the fall festival, 14-year-old Rigoberto came driving slowly up the road (there were almost never any vehicles there) in a huge, shiny, new Dodge Ram. He waved at everyone who hadn’t seen him in a while, and we all greeted him affectionately.
“Rigo is not suffering poverty now,” one of them told me in a whisper, “but the life of a narcotraficante is short. It is better to be poor for a long time than in money and drugs for a short time.”
Sure enough, no one ever heard anything from Rigoberto after 2017, when he was 25. He is a “desaparecido,” someone disappeared and presumed murdered.
All those kids, who would have no way of making a living in their home village, are scattered to the wind: Mauricio is a construction worker in Charlotte, N.C.; Donato owns a very successful construction company in Charlotte; Efigenio is a pastor and security guard in Monterrey, Mexico; Donato is a house painter and doting husband and father in France; and Estela is a housewife in Monterrey.
When I visited Estela in August, she lovingly and with grave emotion gifted me that Coca-Cola-label pocketbook which, she said, Rigoberto had made for her years ago.
Of course, I accepted it graciously, but I thought I’d never use it, and it would just take up space and create clutter in the closet but given its significance, I’d have to keep it forever.
Yet this week I decided to use it. I’m glad I did. It is a special feeling having a bit of Rigoberto and Estela with me all day long.
And here that unique craft of folding wrappers into items has woven together what otherwise would be two separate stories, one about Ricky’s passionate dedication to his craft, and the other about Rigo’s too-early and too-drastic escape from poverty and destitution.
