I was watching television recently, and Peter Walsh, organizational guru of “Clean Sweep” and “Oprah” fame, was on, breaking down a woman’s disorganized life like a shotgun, then holding up the pieces for her to see and explaining all the underlying reasons behind her disorganization. Explaining why her inability to prove the existence of a couch in her living room was really just a symptom of a much larger problem.
To the crying woman, sitting in a kitchen filled with boxes, he said, “you save things for one of two reasons - either a thing has sentimental value, and you keep it, or you think you’re going to need it someday, so you keep it”. He accentuated each point by jabbing the air with a potato masher. Or maybe it was a whisk. The specifics don’t really matter, because I’m paraphrasing anyway.
Preach it, Peter.
I silently appreciated his clear manner of illustrating each problem, and the insightful language he used to bring her to their solutions. He’s one-part closet organizer and two-parts psychologist. And he was peeling this woman like an onion. This silly, disorganized woman, who had so much crap in her house that she…
Suddenly, I had the feeling that I was not alone in the room; I had the feeling that someone was looking at me. This really shouldn’t have been that strange, as Jill was sitting on the couch directly to my left, and she was looking at me. I slowly turned towards her and met her gaze, which was unflinching, slightly accusatory, and firmly fixed upon me. It was one of those looks that could make you say at least three stupid things before she blinked. One of those looks that was saying that Peter was right, and that if he were here, she would totally tell him that I keep a can of egg nog in the basement that I’ve been saving since 1993. A look that said that the woman in the kitchen was actually the man on the couch, sitting next to her, blinking and trying not to say stupid things.
I had no defense, so I simply smiled at her.
There was no denying it, because I do have a can of egg nog in the basement that’s a teenager. In fact, even as correct and true as Peter’s assessment was as to why we save things, the nog doesn’t really fall into either of his two categories. I couldn’t tell you exactly when or where I got that can of egg nog. One day, I just noticed it, and its origins were no more than the faint memory of a dim recollection.
When I was a kid, I remember watching an interview with a guy who’d lost several hundred pounds on an ‘all liquid’ diet. For months, he’d eaten nothing solid, and instead drank only shakes or a thin broth.
“So for seven months, you ate absolutely nothing?” asked the incredulous interviewer.
“Well, there was one time, I realized that I had a salty taste in my mouth, so I think I might have eaten some crackers. But I don’t remember doing it,” the man had answered.
And that’s the nog: a salty taste in my memory that one day left me standing in my kitchen, wondering why I was holding a can of egg nog that was so far past its expiration date. Maybe I’d wanted to save it because it was so old when I first became aware of it. But in any case, it was unassociated with any good times or special memories, so sentimentality is out.
That leaves practicality. Will I ever need it… this antiquated nog? I don’t think so. If I ever did open it, I’m pretty sure it would softly hiss, then slide slowly out like white cranberry jelly, still holding the shape of the inside of the can even as it plopped out wetly onto the countertop.
Each time I find it again, I wonder what I’ll do with it. The last four or five times I’ve come across it, the best reason I can come up with to keep it is that one day, one of my great-grand children could take it onto whatever passes for the 2099 versions of Jay Leno or Regis, and produce it with a flourish to the amazement and delight of a post-apocalyptic audience, sitting attentively around their piles of burning tires. And as far as reasons to keep something go, that one shouldn’t really count.
But I save many, many things, and my reasons for doing so aren’t always valid. At least not to anyone who doesn’t have to wait for their dinner to get pushed into their cell at the end of a broomstick.
A small sampling of the things I’ve saved that defy convention, logic, decorum, and at least three laws regarding the disposal of hazardous biowaste are:
- My wisdom teeth.
- A tooth from my beloved Basset Hound Gordon, which through a series of zany, madcap misadventures, ended up in a batch of my father’s Thanksgiving Oyster Stew.
- Approximately 42 pounds of loose cassette tapes, featuring assorted K-Tel compilations, various individually-purchased cassette singles, and no fewer than 3 copies of Baltimora’s ‘Tarzan Boy’ album.
- Every Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve for the last 19 years.
- The world’s ugliest tie collection, truly.
- Magazines I have never, and will never read.
- Approximately 150 broken and empty frames.
- Every greeting card and letter I’ve ever received… ever.
- A cinderblock-sized stack of Ricky’s Rice Bowl receipts.
- The hot dog chair.
These are all posts for a different day… each of them, and more.
For years, I saved cups beneath my desk at work. My best reason for keeping them was that one day, I was going to make something… like a suit, maybe. A cup suit. I envisioned myself marching into some future Halloween party like the Michelin Man, if the Michelin Man were made of red soda cups. Everyone would turn towards the door, and I’d just be standing there - a giant pile of cups with eyeholes - my hands on my hips, not that you could tell. No one would say a word. Shocked, someone would drop a cup of something, and I’d pluck a new one from myself like some strange tree picking its own fruit, and say, “Need a new cup?”
And everyone would start clapping, and someone would shake my hand and pat me on the back of the cups and say, “It was so worth it, man, saving all those cups!”
But that never happened. Halloweens came, and Halloweens went, and the closest I ever came to using those cups for anything was that one year I went as a garbage bag filled with various things, and cups were among them. Oh, and I taped receipts to my face. And when that party was over, I gingerly removed all the cups, restacked them, and brought them back to my desk for further saving.
Until one day, I decided that I needed to lose even more weight than Liquid Diet himself, and I threw them away. I documented it here, and that made it easier. Suddenly, I realized that I could do away with a great many things in the same manner. I admitted to myself that I would never use these items for any giant, complex reasons or to moderately impress future generations of talk show audiences, even twice removed.
So I’m going to purge our lives of these things, and tell you about it here, whether anyone cares or not.
Documenting these things and posting them here will be my new reason for saving these items. Except that instead of saving them just to save them, I’ll be saving them to get rid of them, the latter of which is what you have to do to get rid of things, by definition. But I’ll still have saved them, after a fashion, as I can always come here to look at them.
And their being here won’t interfere with Jill’s ability to walk across a room, open a closet, or make her all mad and… rational whenever she opens the downstairs fridge.
And maybe the next time Peter Walsh says something insightful, she won’t stare at me. But if she does, it will be with that ‘I-love-my-man’ look, and we can raise our cups in a toast to self-awareness, and a willingness to cut the bonds of sentimentality, unrealized practicality, and foolish pursuits.
And when we do, it will be with regular cups that we may or may not throw away, because we could totally keep them or we could totally throw them away; we aren’t bound to them by some twisted and misplaced sense of nostaglia or purpose, and therefore don’t really need to save them.
Unless Jill wants to.
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