2/7/99

Possessions, Obsessions

What does a person need with three hammers?

   Every 10 years or so, I reorganize. Sometimes it's nothing more than shifting all my shirts from a chair to the closet, or rearranging the books alphabetically instead of heightabetically. But sometimes I reorganize my entire life, like when I move to a new home. Which I just did.
    I can't explain it, but I love saving things and throwing these same things out. I never need 'em when I have 'em, but just as soon as collectibles become garbage -- well, you know the rest.
    So I moved, and filled several dumpsters with stuff like (apparently) the six-page World's Greatest Word Quiz that I've treasured for 18 years but never even glimpsed at. I need it desperately now. But the whereabouts of the quiz is a mystery wrapped in an enigma.
    If I really did junk it, that was stupid, but it was truly wise what I did with my three hammers. I'm not by nature a hammerer, I'm a typist, and I don't actually recall ever using any of the three. So I took just one, if only because sometimes I need to fix my computer keyboard.
    Moving got me moving on projects I've long dreamed of doing. I had a drawer crammed with all my banking documents, but I did not take that drawer to my new home. I cleverly dumped the entire mess on my new desk, which necessitated Doing Something About It. You should come and see how orderly it is now, though in truth, the bank stuff I could have trashed.
    The books were a big problem. I consigned a shelf for sports and games, another for humor, others for language, cookery, Judaica, etc., etc. (That first "etc." is in fact a category.) But as you probably know if you have more than two books in your home, they are unorganizable. My books on art include pocket-sized ones, which look ridiculous alongside coffee-table-sized ones. Thus, every category is split up into small, medium, large, extra-large and odd-sized. I spent hours trying to figure this out, and finally just arranged all my books as small, medium, large, extra-large and odd-sized. (A friend of mine invented this system, I think. In her house, ג€˜Last Tango in Parisג€™ is next to ג€˜Last Waltz in Vienna,ג€™ because they're the same height.)
    I made an inspired effort to end the menace of rampant paper pandemia. I had always handled the situation by having a pile called "Paper" and putting everything on it. It seemed sensible: to have everything centralized, in one place, knowing that everything was right there. The flaw in this logic is obvious. So was the solution, though it took me this late in life to figure it out: now, every scrap of paper has a home in one of 93 slots in three accordion files -- though the word quiz is in none of them.
    There is a childlike effect to sifting through a lifetime of papers. It has always annoyed me that when my kids are told to put their toys away, they don't just scoop everything up and dump it into the appropriate boxes: they play the pieces back into place. Barbies are walked, marbles rolled, animals hop and lope. I understand my kids better now, because I did the same sort of thing with my papers. I read them, pondered them, reflected on the memories they evoked. And only then I pushed them into a slot. It took three days.
    How often do you come across your birth certificate? Letters home from summer camp? I actually found the very first story I ever wrote, and the ticket for the S.S. Homeric  issued to me when I was six weeks old, when I immigrated from England to Canada. How could I not stop and reflect on that for a few minutes? 
    And the poetry. Kee-rist! I couldn't have written that crap ... but I couldn't resist rereading it. Or the embarrassingly sophomoric attempt at my first novel. Gawd. I'll never read it again, and no one else will, it's of such a standard that the recycling depot mailed it back -- so why, oh why is it destined to take up precious shelf space in perpetuity? Like questions about God and the universe, the answer is, don't ask.
    But my new recipe box? Ask, ask!
    For years I've been tearing out select food pages from this here mag, and never again setting eyes on them. Aha, but now, energized by this mad organization kick, I went out and bought a box, index cards and a glue stick, I pulled out my trusty lefthanded scissors, and the result could be featured in ג€˜Good Housekeeping.ג€™
    The principle -- "a place for everything" -- is not completely foolproof. There are still odd items that defy categorization. I mulled over this and came up with a sub-principle: "there must be a place for everything that has no place." That may seem like I retrogressed to the concept of the all-inclusive paper pile, but it has an advantage in that it works like a safety net: if I absolutely cannot find something where it should be, there's always one more place to look. (Of course I looked; it's not there either.)
    This is the Incongruous Zone, where my bar mitzva tefillin and chef's hat from cooking school live side by side. My children's impractical handiwork will be there until I bestow it all on their children. There's a case of 100,000 staples I've had for 20 years, and at the rate I use them, they'll last another 80 (I'm hoping they rust, so I can justify throwing them out). A complete set of 1964 hockey cards. Records, but no record player. Furniture I made in high school, but can't find a use for. Mickey, the original denizen of the IZ, a puppet I got when I was three. Old x-rays.
    The last time I did this all-out purge of possessions was when I made aliya. Then, the categories were much more dramatic: "Bring With," "Give Away," "Put in Storage For Several Years Until I Settle Down."
    What I brought with, I was able to fit into a knapsack (and that included the, ugh, poetry). That, then, was my home.
    This time, what I brought with, I needed a four-room apartment. It's a good thing I don't have that knapsack anymore, because I really don't know where I'd put it.