Welcome to another installment of “Dad, Interrupted.”
“Dad, Interrupted” is a weekly newsletter where I describe, in lighthearted, moderately embroidered stories, my family-man misadventures with my wife, my kids, my friends, my in-laws and the assorted chuckleheads I bump into.
This week I’d like to examine a topic that is a touchy one in many families – neatness.
I was a messy young man, I admit. When I was in grad school, I did briefly lose a rocking chair in my room. It was obscured mostly by a mound of jackets and sweaters, months’ of newspapers and many books, class handouts, squash rackets, a very large, very frayed knapsack, and many fliers I’d gotten protesting apartheid in South Africa, which was still going strong.
Of course you can’t really lose a rocking chair for very long, especially in a small dorm room, but it did take me a few seconds to locate it, which was enough time for the friend who was visiting me to spin the story of the lost rocking chair. Then of course this tale took on a life of its own, and passed into family legend.
I mended my messy ways long ago — I’m not sure if I just got mature, or if it was because we had kids, or maybe I was just getting tired of losing things in the morass. I am not a minimalist but I do now like a leaner approach to life than I once did. I’m too lazy to Google it but I think it was Dostoyevsky who said something like, “The more possessions a man has, the poorer he is.”
My family, though, is emphatically not of the same mind. In fact, when it comes to housekeeping, I am a party of one, as you will see in this week’s installment:
“I can’t find the silver vegetable peeler,” Patrick says. He is a teenager and a budding punk rocker, and has recently gotten into making smoothies. Today’s recipe calls for carrots, among other things.
“Dad?” he asks me pointedly. “Silver vegetable peeler?”
“That’s one of my mother’s peelers,” adds Jeanette, also pointedly. Ominously, she is folding down the corners of many, many pages in the White Flower Farm catalogue, the most expensive gardening catalogue on earth. I make a mental note to unfold and smooth down the pages later.
My wife’s and son’s eyes are trained on me during this conversation because the family associates me with things that have gone missing. They say that I have the soul of a housemaid, with an annoying need to recycle, discard, consolidate, pare, curate, cull, and prune. So whenever something is missing — a magazine, an old Halloween mask, a Cracker Jack toy — it is assumed that I have chucked it. All three of my loved ones are capital K Keepers, and I, they would all agree, am not a Keeper.
“Honey, you can edit your writing, but you can’t edit life itself,” Jeanette often says to me during my cleanups. This sounds profound, I tell her, but it isn’t.
Now, the fact is I did recycle the silver vegetable peeler, and the reason was that I noticed it didn’t work that well anymore. I don’t tell anyone that I have put it in the metal recycling basket because that admission would not be productive. But I do say that if the silver peeler is gone — and not merely misplaced, as happens often in our cluttered household — we still own four vegetable peelers.
“Never in the history of our kitchen have four people been peeling vegetables simultaneously,” I say. “We have a deep, deep bench in peelers.”
It is true that I have made mistakes in my quest to streamline our home. I once recycled a metal doodad that I found under the hot-water heater in the basement. To my eye it had to be a bit of trash left behind by Jerry the plumber when he was working down there. But I was wrong. The doodad was actually a drum key for Patrick’s band. Never having played the drums, I didn’t know this. Definitely my fault, even though the key was by the hot-water heater — which is not exactly a spot that screams “musical equipment.”
In our house, all things can be anywhere the spirit moves them. They have free passage.
Our house is like a nation, but in reverse. Nations have strict rules about what can enter their territory, but outgoing stuff gets far less attention. This makes perfect sense, given all the nightmarish things – drugs, dirty bombs, invasive bugs, horrible viruses – that countries want to keep out.
But in our house we exercise exactly zero scrutiny of incoming items. It’s “Open the gates wide, and put out the welcome mat.” This is reason that for years I have sheltered a seatless chair, a lone sawhorse — and nothing is more useless than one sawhorse — and a chain-mail thing. No one knows who brought the chain-mail thing into our house nor even what it is or does.
On the other hand, once something has crossed our threshold, the open-door policy is slammed shut and bolted. Traffic into the house is a multi-lane, high-speed autobahn; the road out of the house is one lane and policed by stern customs agents and border police. I know. I have tried to travel that road.
Here’s an example:
“Why are you throwing out that chair, honey?” Jeanette asks me.
“Because it has no seat,” I say.
“Maybe we can have a seat made,” she says.
“Do we need another chair?” I ask.
“The wood is nice,” Jeanette answers. “Or maybe we could use the seat from another chair on this chair.”
“OK,” I say. “But then can I recycle the other chair, the one that will no longer have a seat? Because, you know, we actually have plenty of chairs.”
“Um, we could use the legs from THAT chair as stakes for the tomato plants,” Jeanette says. “Problem solved!” She heads airily upstairs.
I lose all these “keep or toss” debates because there is nothing on God’s green earth that doesn’t have some potential, theoretical use. Starbucks cups are pots for sprouting bean plants. Pants with torn knees can be sliced into shorts. Empty wine bottles are funky candlesticks.
There’s another reason I lose these debates. I call it “the sentimental checkmate”:
“What are you doing with those Vogue magazines?” Jeanette asks me as I stagger by with a teetering tower of them.
“They’re from the 1980s,” I say from behind the pile. “I saw one with Cindy Crawford on the cover. Did you know she’s promoting anti-aging cream now?”
“But I’ve been saving the Vogues so if we ever had a daughter she and I could look at them when she grew up.”
“We do have a daughter and she just turned 27. Have you guys ever looked at any of them?”
Jeanette says nothing, but gives me a long, steady, look that says some dark thing about my cavalier attitude toward mothers and daughters. Conversation over.
Given our backwards import-export rules, I have evolved into a smuggler in reverse. I sneak stuff out of the house instead of into the house. First, I stow the target items under our stoop. Our stoop has a little door so you can store things inside. It’s meant for snow shovels and garden gear but I’ve repurposed the space.
I keep the items there for three months. If one of the Keepers misses it or I learn that an item has some real use — maybe it’s a drum key and not a leftover plumbing bit — then I’ll hustle it back into the house.
But if not, if no one says a thing for three months, that means they probably won’t miss it.I set it on the curb for trash or recycling pickup.
Auf wiedershen!
“Yum, this smoothie is excellent, Pat!” I say after the discussion about the vegetable peelers. “Whichever peeler you ended up using, it seems to have worked really, really well.”
Jeanette gives me another long appraising look.
The Soul of a Housemaid