Occasionally, the difference between men and women astounds me. Take, for example, the garage. Call me naive, but I’ve always thought of a garage as a nice, convenient place to store big objects like, say, a car.
My husband, on the other hand, has always considered it to be more of an extra closet, the perfect place to keep everything that doesn’t qualify to live inside the house. Stuff like peace-sign cement cinder blocks, wrenches, cans of motor oil, rusty nails, burned out circuit boards and tape players.
In other words junk.
Ok, I’ll admit it, we all have some junk in our lives. Even sane, logical people have things they’ll never get rid of. My friend Barb’s husband (an educated man with a Master’s degree in business) is emotionally attached to cases of sticky notes he kept from his first job twelve years ago.
But, face it, you can’t go around saving everything.
So I dropped the bomb one morning over breakfast. I turned and looked my husband straight in the eye and said, “Today I’m going to clean out the garage.”
He smiled at me, clearly missing the magnitude of my decision. “Why?”
“So we can get into the car each morning without running through the sprinklers,” I said.
“Bu-”
“Don’t get all worked up,” I said. “I’m only going to get rid of all the stuff we don’t need anymore.
“What stuff? MY stuff?”
I could see he wasn’t ready for the full impact so I proceeded slowly.
“Oh, just a few things we don’t need anymore. Like maybe the five VCRs that haven’t worked since sometime in 1987, and the disco ball with the black light.”
I could tell by the way he was staring at me that this wasn’t going to be easy. Clearly, if I wanted to make any progress, I’d need a better plan.
So I called my friend Julie, the only person I knew who could fit two entire cars into her garage.
“How do you do it?” I asked her. “How do you keep your garage so clean?”
“Baby steps,” she said simply. “Start with the less obvious junk and gradually work it around the garage towards the trunk of your car. After about three days, toss it in. By the time you get rid of it, he won’t even notice it’s gone.”
Now a good person would think, “Wait a minute! This is sneaky and just plain wrong. I can’t go around manipulating people’s property this way.”
A medium-good person would think, “Well, I feel bad but, hey, something has to be done.”
Me, I waited until my husband went to work and moved his spare lawn mower over by water softener. Then I scooted his box of fishing lures towards the water heater and started dispersing old computer parts on the shelves above the door.
However, once I got started I discovered two particular drawbacks to this system. The first is that, at this rate, the garage would be cleared sometime around 2076 and I’d be too old to enjoy it. The second is that deep down sneaking around this way just feels, well, wrong.
That said, I did discover one enormous perk. By rearranging his junk I had accidentally created more space in the garage. Not enough to park a car, mind you. But enough to hold, say, a big box of maternity clothes and my college textbooks.
Not that I plan on keeping them.
