brooklyn

The red suitcase

Sometimes I become intrigued by the history of people…not the famous ones, but the ones that we cross paths with every day.   Last week when visiting brooklyn, I purchased a vintage red suitcase.  There is something about owning a piece of someone else's life that fascinates me.  Inside the suitcase is handwritten the name of Gloria Scrubbs.  Doing some google search, I found the exact name to be Gloria Ines Scrubbs from Brooklyn.  

And then it stroke me,who is Gloria Ines? where did she travel with her red suitcase?  Did she traveled to Europe? or was this her childhood suitcase, where her mother neetely folded her dresses for visiting grandma in another city or maybe another country?

I’ll just would like to imagine her, with a white dress, black hair, red lipstick and flower scarf, waiting in the station for the train to arrive.  She was going for the weekend to visit the love of her life.  It was a short stay, so she only brought her little red suitcase.  Maybe Gloria met him when traveling to Spain to visit her relatives, maybe he was a sailor.  I think they met in a café when Gloria went to get her grandmother some bread and cheese.  On her way out, there he was, as he has been waiting all his life for her to show up.  They looked to each other….and they knew, they were ment to be together.

When the summer was over, the young Sailor returned for the states, they sayed their goodbyes, but promise to write to each other.  Gloria’s family was from Puerto Rico, but her father relocated to New York, Brooklyn, in search of better opportunities.  So when Gloria arrived to New York, she wrote to her sailor,and soon they began their love story, full of dreams and handwritten love letters, all wich she carried in her red little suitcase.

I just met Gloria, she was a wanderlust, and her story is just beginning…