You know, sometimes you put yourself out in the newspaper and
you get a big old slap upside the head. Take last week, for
example. I wrote a column bragging about how organized I am.
Imagine my surprise when people e-mailed to let me know that merely
arranging magazines into piles didn’t mean I was organized.
You know, sometimes you put yourself out in the newspaper and you get a big old slap upside the head. Take last week, for example. I wrote a column bragging about how organized I am. Imagine my surprise when people e-mailed to let me know that merely arranging magazines into piles didn’t mean I was organized.
Hello? I have my magazines in FOUR piles for Pete’s sake. I could have just had one huge pile, but no. I took the time to separate my magazines into four different piles. And each pile is arranged according to strict criteria ranging from a “must read” pile to a “read only if nothing else is available” pile.
But that’s not good enough. Apparently, just having piles in the first place is bad. In fact, according to my e-mailers, if I have piles of stuff around my house, it means that I am unorganized. And, incredibly, one person told me that even organized chaos is still chaos.
So I looked around and I did the first thing everyone said to do. I purged. Now, I’m not talking about my lunch – I’m talking about my linen closet. I took everything out of it – mainly because I couldn’t close the doors anymore since the sheets and towels were spilling out into the hallway – and sorted it into “keep” and “toss” piles. And yes, I do appreciate the irony of that.
In any event, I don’t mind admitting that it was really difficult for me. Look, I found towels in there that were wedding gifts 21 years ago. Wedding gifts.
So they had some sentimental value. And a part of me – a really big part – wanted to keep them. But do you know what 21-year-old towels feel like? They crunch.
Really. When you fold them they make a noise that sounds just like stale potato chips being squished in a bag. So I purged them. And once I purged the wedding towels, I didn’t look back. I purged the waterbed sheets from a bed we got rid of 8 years ago. I purged Junior’s old toddler bed sheets. I even purged sheets from Junior’s current bed that had dinosaurs dancing on them because honestly, Junior would not be caught dead with dancing dino sheets at nearly 11 years old. He didn’t even like them at 5, when I first bought them.
And after I purged, a miracle happened. The dang doors on the linen closet shut. I nearly wept with happiness. No longer would I walk down a dark hallway and ram my knees into the linen closet doors. No longer would Harry try to shove the upper doors closed and then swear like a sailor when they popped back out and bonked him on the noggin. We were a family with a closed linen closet. And that’s when I realized that purging is good.
So I went crazy. In the last week I’ve purged the towels in all the bathrooms. Then I purged my dresser. My closet. Junior’s dresser. I was a purging fool.
Nothing was safe. I purged whenever I had a free moment. Waiting for hot water to heat for tea? No sense wasting that time, so I’d purge a kitchen drawer. Waiting for Junior to finish homework? I’d purge a cabinet. I even purged the freezer and the fridge. You would not believe what old salami can become. At least, I think it used to be salami. It might have been cheese. Or maybe pudding.
Anyway, I purged like a demon. Pretty soon, Harry took the first victims of my purging to Goodwill. He filled the truck. And I still had a line of bagged up junk along the entire hallway, waiting patiently for its turn to be donated. And I purged even more. I emptied closets. I emptied drawers and cabinets and bookshelves.
And then one day, as I purged the pantry while waiting for dinner to be delivered, I heard Junior say to Harry, “Dad, I’m scared. Is Mom going to purge us?”
And I felt awful. But I couldn’t stop. The truth is, once I got the linen closet to stay closed, it was like a whole new world opened up for me. One where I could find things. So I reassured my son that I could never purge him. But just in case, he’d better not stand in front of the TV cabinet.
Because I’m purging that next.
