A couple days ago, my Chair sent a message to all her hapless victims, oops, I mean, all her students, letting us know she is unexpectedly out of the office until Monday. Maybe it's a ploy to buy more time to review my massive dissertation. Maybe she's got some job interviews lined up. Maybe she has moved to Florida. No, wait, she already lives in Florida. Well, who knows? I hope she is okay. In the meantime, I am trying not to dwell on the millions of problems I expect she and the committee will find with my dissertation. I am trying not to think about time passing, tick tock. Instead, I continue my housecleaning blitz.
I took all the clothes off the clothes rod and piled them on my bed. Some of the garments are wrapped in old crinkly clear plastic cleaner bags. The cat immediately freaked and ran, I assumed to hunker down under the couch. He hates the crinkly sound of plastic bags.
Once the clothes were out, I could see the closet much better. Most of the floor was occupied by a small shop vac, purchased from Sears about 12 years ago, rarely used because of its unbearably loud roar. I think I've vacuumed my car with it twice, assisted by a two-mile long extension cord running from my back door to the gravel parking lot where I park my car. Twice. In 12 years. What would my life be without a shop vac, I wondered? Poorer, maybe, if I had any desire to vacuum my floor mats. But after a minute of contemplation, I realized I'd trade the prospect of toothpick-free floor mats for some empty floor space in my closet in a heartbeat. I packed up the accessories, found the owner's manual, stuffed it all inside the belly of the little beast and taped it shut. I rolled the machine out to the front door and parked it next to two paper shopping bags standing ready to accumulate other castoff clutter. Take my vac—please!
Next I tackled the shelves. Some festively colored plastic baskets held a variety of junk I hadn't looked at in years, judging by the pristine layer of dust coating everything. I dug under the dust and found things I have no memory of buying: shower curtain liners (two unopened packages! I only have one shower, and I never use it!), plus three unopened packages of suction cups with little hooks attached. Wha—? Maybe I was planning on covering the hideous beige Formica shower stall? I can't remember, but it sounds like something I might have done about ten years ago when I first moved into the Love Shack. When the walls were bare, when there were no cat seats or curtains or furniture, other than a refrigerator and a stove, and I don't think those really count as furniture, do they?
I put the curtains and the hooks in the ARC bag and went digging for more junk. Hmmm, lots of electrical stuff, odds and ends. An unopened kit to hang a swag lamp. I obviously didn't know I had that in the closet, since a couple years ago I purchased a kit from IKEA and installed it over my desk area. It's got one of those balloon-shaped white paper shades on it. One swag is all I have room for, so in the bag goes the old swag kit (much better quality than the IKEA version, I might add, but oh well). What else? Let's see. A glass-less, cardboard-less black and gilt picture frame, no doubt a gift that used to hold some certificate or other that someone at my former job thought I would be proud to receive. Probably a certificate testifying to the fact that I am qualified to teach keyboarding. Was qualified. My teaching skills are rusty after almost six months of non-use.
But wait, there's more: An electric socket kit; a black nylon zipfront jacket I bought to wear to the freezing cold gym and then dropped my membership but kept the jacket and never wore it once (too tight!); an electric alarm clock (two alarms but no radio, replaced several years ago by a similar alarm clock, with two alarms and a radio); a black shirt with too-short sleeves, made of 1970s Indian cotton gauze, the sort of fabric that looks like a wrinkled mess even after you iron it; an unopened spool of speaker wire; a 2-foot under-cabinet fluorescent light; and a cheesy backpack, the kind you get when you donate to the Sierra Club.
What else is in the closet? A box of paint cans. A wooden easel. My huge brown leather portfolio, with it's broken handle and carefully incised etching of a leaping naked man (Hermes, I think), and which contains all the illustrations I made when I was in my fashion illustrator phase, circa 1979. I have no idea what to do with all that stuff. No one could possibly want it, but I can't bear to throw it all away. And at the back of the closet, wrapped in a dingy off-white flannel blanket and wrapped with bone-dry masking tape: probably the most valuable thing I own, to me anyway. The painting that inspired me to become a painter.
It's a landscape, about 26" x 32", of some dark clumps of autumn trees separated by a slow-moving river, which reflects a lowering sunset. The paint is thick, the style impressionist. There might have once been an artist's name inscribed in the lower right corner, but if there was, it is unintelligible now. The back of the painting is covered in very old paper, which is cracked and peeling. A bit of cardboard peeps through, but there is nothing written that I can see. I'm tempted to peel up the paper, to see if there might be a clue.
The painting has been in my closet since my mother sold the house where my father died and moved to her condo. That was what, 2005? She didn't want the painting, or more accurately, she knew I did. She's in jettisoning mode, too. I think that is what happens to some people when they get old: They start giving stuff away, in preparation for their departure. Me, I just want to recycle some of my clutter. But not this painting. Someday I will have it appraised and if I can afford it, I will have the years of cigar and cigarette smoke carefully removed from its surface. Maybe someday I will be privileged to see what it looked like when the unknown artist first painted it.
I hung it up on my wall, half over one of my own paintings. It's nothing like my paintings, and yet, this dark landscape is encoded in my artistic DNA. I don't know why I didn't hang it up sooner. Probably for the same reason I never knew I had a swag lamp kit, two shower curtain liners, and 24 suction cup hooks. The Bermuda Triangle of closets.
The last task was to sort through all the clothes on the bed. I found myself wondering what the Style Makeover guys would have to say if they saw my wardrobe. Almost all my clothes came from Goodwill or Value Village. Mostly I am talking about jackets and flannel shirts. They all have that musty, dragged in the mud, then washed in cold water look to them. A few things stand out: the men's cashmere coat I found at Goodwill for $20 (warm! disintegrating!); a periwinkle blue linen suit I made back in the late 1980s, when I could still see well enough to sew, when I used to sew for a living (another story); and my black polyester bachelor's graduation robe, which I wore twice a year for almost ten years to my former employer's graduation ceremonies, along with the un-hoodlike hood and the flat mortarboard cap. Should I keep it? I couldn't decide, so I kept it. If nothing else, it could make a good Halloween costume.
