A Neatnik in the House

I have posted recently about my distinct lack of the Neatness gene. But I try. I was in a friend's home recently and the sheer quantity of tchotchkes, knickknacks and gewgaws left me feeling claustrophobic! Another friend's home contained stacks of papers and magazines that screamed of fire hazard. The stacks also reminded me of a young man who rented a room from me when Scott was in his first year of college and Tyler in Germany for his exchange year. This young man subscribed to the Wall Street Journal every day. His job kept him too busy to read them, so he just stacked them up in his bedroom. The stacks grew to four feet tall and covered most of the floor space that wasn't consumed by his bed and his desk. He kept saying he was going to read them. As I recall, he boxed them up and took them with him when he moved back to Richmond to attend law school.

John subscribed to the New Yorker and kept back issues around until he had time to read them. His mother complained once about having nothing to read, so we offered to bring her a dozen old copies of New Yorker. She said, "That news is old," scoffing at our offer.

I subscribe to three or four magazines. I do not read them cover to cover, but frequently keep them. In the past few weeks, I've started tossing the issues of Oprah and Simple Living after briefly flipping through them. I don't have time to sew or knit or bead, and those are my passions. I cannot practice my passions and find time to read magazines that are not passions. There has to be a dividing line between things about which I'm passionate and things that are merely interesting.

I have subscribed to Threads magazine for 16 years and I have every copy. However, Taunton Press has just produced a DVD containing every issue, every photo, every advertisement from the first volume, first issue to the November/December issue of 2009. That's 149 issues. It costs $149.95. If I bought that DVD, I could give away all my old copies of Threads and not worry that I was losing valuable information. There's another dividing line: I have boxes and boxes of Threads magazines that I never look at; I could have all of them on one disc and at least when I wanted to find a specific article or scan through old issues, I could search and find the article I wanted. But $150? That's a lot of money. Argh!

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Okay, so you see the kinds of decisions I'm faced with as I try to neaten up and declutter the place. I didn't even address all the antique clocks that I don't really have a place for. Should I just stick them all on a shelf in the basement until I figure out where to put them? Again, argh!

So back to the story in mind when my attention was diverted by the thoughts of stacks of magazines. We got home from Cleveland Sunday evening after our fun weekend with friends, and the Jazzman disappeared while I was tending to laundry and kitchen. We had spent portions of the weekend discussing closet space. When I went upstairs in search of him, he was in my bedroom. He opened the armoire door and proudly showed me all the hangers he had pulled out of my closet and consolidated in one side of the armoire. (Really, he was like a squirrel with a stash of acorns. Or like Boston with all his Star Wars Legos mini-figures.) Yeah, okay, so I take a blouse or a jacket off the hanger, and I leave the hanger there. And your point is …? Oh, yeah, now I remember. Your point is I don't have enough space in my closet for all my clothes.

Well, really, I wanted to smack him. Why? Partly because he was right. But also partly because I was embarrassed by my un-neatnik behavior. And I was going to have to find someplace to put those hangers, something to do with them. That's my biggest problem: If I don't know what to do with something, it just sits there. I'm immobilized by things that I don't know what to do with. I was fretting about what to do with the hangers. So I ignored them.

When I got home from rehearsal on Monday night, I ran downstairs to deal with laundry. I glanced around the basement and, Voila!, the hangers had magically transported themselves from my bedroom to the basement. Or some thoughtful man who is simultaneously funny and kind had brought them to the basement for me so I wouldn't have to worry my little head about them.

I'm telling you, this man is a keeper. A neatnik and a keeper.