If you are a young homeowner just settling in to your first house, let me offer some unsolicited advice: throw it out. Whatever it is, toss it. Goodwill, a neighbor, the ReStore, the dump, Craigslist, the doorstep of a friend in the dead of night — there are many outlets for your stuff. Just don’t put it in the basement or attic. Don’t tuck it into a drawer. Don’t start using an unused closet. Don’t start down that road to oblivion.
I speak from hard experience. After just over 20 years in the same place, Dianne and I are selling our house in the Regent neighborhood. And over those two decades, we never had to make a hard decision. There was always a nook or a cranny, a little more room in that closet upstairs if you just reorganized. And for the last few months we’ve been getting paid back for two decades of... not so much bad decisions, but avoiding decisions altogether.
For example.
I discovered a box full of my college notebooks. I suppose I saved them because, having failed to review any of them right before an exam, I figured that they’d still come in handy later on in adult life. But, ya know, I spent eight years in public office and never once found an occasion to go back and look up John Locke’s theory of the social contract. Damndest thing. To the recycling bin!
About 15 years ago I took down some old cabinets and saved all of the hinges because you never know when you might need a hinge. And I was right! A few months ago I was building a small cabinet and I needed a couple of hinges and by pure dumb luck I happened to stumble on that bag o’ hinges. I added a third hinge, which was unnecessary, but why not? There were still 47 left. To the ReStore!
In the attic I had two guitars. This wouldn’t seem excessive at all for a musician. But I am tone deaf and have no sense of rhythm whatsoever. Any musical instrument is as useful to me as a bike is to a fish (or a man is to a woman, if you believe the bumper stickers). To Craigslist! Where a nice young man named Caleb saw one of those guitars and claimed it. He stopped by the house to play it before he took it home and in five minutes coaxed beautiful sounds from that guitar that had been locked up in it for 40 years under my leaden fingers. The guitar practically jumped into his arms. I haven’t decided what to do with the other instrument. Part of me thinks that if I keep it I can actually learn how to play it. It’s the same part of me that believes that if we just wait long enough Donald Trump will become a statesman.
In our basement I had my great-grandmother’s Hoosier cabinet, which actually started its life in Pennsylvania, but came to our basement by way of my grandparents’ basement in South Bend. I had always planned to fix it up. Those plans stretched back at least a decade. To my brother Jack, who actually fixes stuff up!
In my closet and in a box in the attic I had a total of 170 neckties. I really liked ties, but now I almost never wear one. I sorted through them and kept the ones with meaning — the tie I wore on my wedding day, the one I wore the day I was sworn in as mayor, the tie I wore to my father’s funeral — and also the ones I just liked. I now have only 80 ties! The rest went to my friend Jordy, who didn’t really want them but whose wife suggested that maybe having more than one tie was a good idea.
And then there was the political stuff. I had plaque build-up. Awards given to me from organizations that don’t even exist any more for mundane things that I had forgotten doing. To the trash bin!
Under our porch I had lawn signs galore. Kerry-Edwards. That didn’t work out so good. Three incarnations of Cieslewicz for Mayor. Two worked pretty well. The last one, not so much. The Fred Risser signs, of course, will be good forever. Still, to the dump with them all!
Still, I kept too much political stuff. But it is all now neatly stored in transparent plastic bins and ensconced in the Dave Archives in the basement of our place up north. When I die it’ll go to the Historical Society. Let those poor bastards throw it out!
That’s only a small sampling, but suffice it to say that when we were done I painted the basement floor. If that doesn’t sound like a remarkable accomplishment to you — he painted the basement floor — then I’d say you are a young person who has not lived in one place long enough. Getting to the point where a person can paint his basement floor means that Herculean physical tasks and feats of emotional courage have been performed countless times. Painting the basement floor is not unlike scaling Mount Everest, finishing the Boston Marathon with a respectable time or learning to speak Portuguese. It is nothing less than the culmination of dogged determination and grit. It was one of the proudest accomplishments of my life.
I can’t tell you how good all this feels. I literally feel lighter, freer. All that stuff was weighing me down. Sometimes I wander down to the basement or up to the attic and just look around at all the dust-free empty space and all the fresh paint. And if I ever need to recall anything about John Locke, there’s always Wikipedia.
