Marti Attoun: Staying healthy harder than it looks | Lifestyles

I try to stay healthy. I eat bread that has more fiber than a birchbark canoe. I reach for a carrot stick instead of a carrot cake, sometimes.

I avoid a hitch in my gitalong by letting the yard sale host wrestle the 200-pound concrete doe into my truck bed.

So it was shocking to learn that I’ve been unwittingly endangering my health for years. I’m not proud to admit this, but I never wash my wallet.

In fact, it never crossed my mind that my dirty billfold could be out to get me until I read about a new self-sanitizing copper wallet. Yes, copper. It supposedly kills germs and viruses on contact.

Of the endless things to fret about — 1,450 calories in a Texas Road House onion blossom and ball pythons that escape their owners and pop up in strangers’ bathtubs — my purple floral billfold is one thing that has never caused me worry. Other than a tendency to be self-emptying, it’s been a loyal friend.

Until now. I look at it as if seeing it for the first time and realize it needs a good power-washing. Is that a pistil on that purple flower or a crumb from a glazed doughnut? With its smudges and fingerprints, the wallet looks like evidence in a culinary crime scene. From its slip pockets, I extract tiny wadded receipts and what appears to be a half-eaten Altoids.

I blame my family for my poor wallet hygiene. Mom believed in carrying a wallet until it decomposed. She was a member of the “waste not, want not” generation. She didn’t buy new mops, either, but clamped worn towels on mop sticks.

Mom carried the same red vinyl change purse for years. When its stitching at the seams disintegrated and threatened to dump her Social Security card, driver’s license and other vital documents, she clamped a rubber band around the whole thing.

My spouse’s distressed brown leather wallet looked like a trampled lump of roadkill. It lived with us for decades until the kids insisted on buying him a new wallet last Christmas.

Unfortunately, it’s not the copper self-sanitizing model. But I’m doing my best to pick it clean and keep us healthy.

Marti Attoun’s “Booth 186: My Secondhand Career in Vintage Corsets, Moose Heads and Other Moth-Eaten Antiques,” is available as an e-book on Amazon.