NEXT AVENUE SPECIAL SECTION
My Lonely War Against Stuff By Francis Flaherty
I was a messy young man. In grad school, I lost a rocking chair in my room. It was obscured by a mound of jackets and sweaters, months of newspapers, a large 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. That was enough time for the friend who was visiting me to spin the story of Frank's lost rocking chair. Of course, this tale grew and soon passed into family legend. But I mended my messy ways long ago. Maybe I just got tired of losing things in the morass. Whatever the reason, the new me likes a leaner approach to life. My loved ones say I have the soul of a housemaid, with an annoying impulse to recycle, dispose, consolidate, pare, curate, cull and prune. They say proudly that they are Keepers — and that I am definitely not a Keeper. "Honey, you can edit your writing, but you cannot edit life itself, " my wife frequently says during my many cleanups. This sounds profound, I tell her, but it isn't.
Naturally, when he couldn't find the peeler, both he and my wife looked pointedly at me. I was tried, convicted and sentenced of ejecting the peeler, even though I was just innocently sitting there reading the newspaper. Now, truth be told, I did recycle the silver vegetable peeler, and the reason was that it didn't work anymore. But I didn't tell them this. Instead, I just jumped up and rifled through the crammed kitchen drawers and quickly found no fewer than four other vegetable peelers. This is why I remember the vegetable peeler incident. Because I found incontrovertible proof that our household is bloated with stuff.
"Honey, you can edit your writing, but you cannot edit life itself"
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It's hard being the neat one. Years back, I remember, our then-teenage son was developing a fondness for homemade smoothies. He was looking for our silver vegetable peeler.
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