When PLEATHER Dies ….

I remember when ‘pleather’ became a ‘thing.’ It started showing up as shoes and purses and some pretty cool-looking jackets. After a while it was so leather-like only a close inspection by a well-trained eye could tell the difference. It was far cheaper than leather and became a cost-effective alternative to everything made of genuine cowhide. It was hard to resist so I bought some stuff and mostly liked it.

Way back in the 80s Blade Runner was a favorite science fiction movie of mine. Harrison Ford played a space bounty hunter out looking for renegade androids … the ones that evolved a bit and wanted their independence in a futuristic world. He caught up with a few and ended up visiting a manufacturing company that made androids. He hoped to get tips from the manufacturer about them to make his bounty hunting easier as he struck out on a mission to find several very specific ones with extremely high bounties.

The owner of the android manufacturing company had gone a step further, giving his androids the ability to THINK and REASON, and included in them actual fictitious memories.  He gave them memories of childhood friends, families and experiences in their positronic brains as he was manufacturing them… giving BIRTH to them. He included in each one an ‘incept date’ (much like a birth date) and a cessation date (although I can’t remember what that was actually called.)

Deckard (Ford) falls in love with a hauntingly lovely young woman that works at the android factory. He quite accidentally finds out that she is an android programmed with memories and experiences, family and friends. She does NOT know she is an android and doesn’t believe … until later … that Deckard’s discovery is a fact. They take off together, deeply in love and Deckard discovers that while Racheal has an INCEPT date, she doesn’t have a CESSATION date (or whatever Philip K. Dick called it in his novel –  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – that Blade Rinner was adapted from).

Deckard and Rachael decide they will NOT worry themselves about Rachael’s cessation date. They will live their lives happily together and enjoy the time they have … much like all of us do that aren’t in blockbuster science fiction movies.

I mention this favorite movie because it is, kinda, the story of pleather and that’s what I thought of as my husband and I were cleaning out closets in preparation for having our entire second floor recarpeted.

We ran into several pleather items I’d had for a while and I was dismayed to find them – the older ones – a jacket, several pairs of shoes and numerous pleather purses degrading or decomposing or deteriorating or whatever that ugly process was. What a mess!

The pleather was in a number of stages of CESSATION … slick, gummy, peeling, flaking or combinations of all of those things. I was shocked.

And then I thought of Blade Runner. When you purchase a pleather item you pretty much know its INCEPT date but not when or even THAT it will suddenly belly-up in your closet some years later leaving a slimy, flaking trail on the floor or shelf where you had it hung or stored.

The thing is, just like Rachael and Deckard, I enjoyed the life of those pleather things but didn’t realize until the closet-cleaning extravaganza that one day, without notice, they would simply U and D (that’s nurse speak for “Up and Die”). It was a hard fact to come face-to-face with. It was emotionally jarring in a few cases.  

On the UP side of the closet thing, I found some stuff I could still wear that I’d forgotten about and two boxes of stuff from “my life.” I took a couple of side trips into those boxes with my husband and found an autograph book from the fourth grade, my first diary that I actually addressed as “Dear Diary” every day for about six months in sixth grade, some special letters sent to me over forty years ago. There were some pictures from childhood, my teens, my early years as a nursing student and a special picture of seven of us … six little girl friends and me at a pajama party. We were ages 12 and 13.

Those long-forgotten treasures were worth the days we spent cleaning out closets. They brought back memories … special ones that I had forgotten – special parts of my life and who I was and am.

I posted the pajama party picture on Facebook and got responses from 3 of those now pretty cool women saying what a treasure that picture was.

That couple hours tip-toeing down Memory Lane in those two forgotten boxes almost made all those days of closet cleaning worth it. It also made it easier to deal with the loss that I was not expecting when pleather dies.