‘I’m not a hoarder,” I protested as Mary and Emily, our eldest daughter, who lives in the far reaches of Ohio, were talking on the phone the other night.
“He’s not a hoarder,” Mary, who has been on a purging binge lately, repeated so that Emily was sure to hear. “He just doesn’t get rid of things.”
“As in ‘I’m not fat, I just can’t button my pants,’ ” said Emily, who was on speaker phone. “You take it from there, Dad. I’m sure you can get a column out of this.”
“As in ‘I’m not old, I just can’t move?’ ”
“That’s the idea.”
Actually, aside from the fact that I can’t move, I don’t feel old. It’s all — well, it’s mostly all — in the mind. The idea is to remain engaged. Love and work, said Freud, and for love and work to really work one must stay engaged. If I really love Mary, for instance, I will remain engaged with hiding as best I can anything which, if seen, she might want to throw out. And when you get down to it, it’s better that she focus on things that need to be discarded, rather than on people who need to be.
There is still some room in my Collyer brothers-like office for me, though piled sports pages dating to the last century, imploded cardboard file cabinets that are impossible to open, books on various uplifting subjects in deranged order, and file folders borrowed from the metal cabinets downstairs, decades ago in some cases, that have yet to be returned are closing in.
When I told Mary recently that I was reading “Alice in Wonderland” again, she recoiled, making a face and saying it was all about disorder, chaos. I think that’s when she began this latest purge.
There’s a place for everything and everything’s not in its place is more or less the maxim I have lived by, but I know if I want to stay in her good graces, which I do, if I want to stay engaged, and married, I must at least give lip service to the struggle against entropy, even if the removal of all that clutter from my closet at home to the office may risk my being stifled by stuff. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come silently indicated as much in a dream I had last night.
“But why show me this, Spirit, if I am past all hope?” I said to him. “You never know. Maybe I’ll survive it!”