Tidying Up

Why is our work room cluttered and disorganized? Why is our yard not a picturesque scene? Why, now that we are not burdened with the task of getting and not even much burdened with the task of spending, do we not live in a more orderly environment? Why, now that children are not a regular part of our household, are we not living in a haven of orderliness? This is a question that could bear a long winter’s pondering. All the older people I know who do the kind of things I do seem to suffer similarly. Our brains may be as neat as a pin (but just how neat is a pin or a bandbox, either?), but our surroundings lack neatness as well as orderliness.

Garrison Keillor the other day suggested that our yards are always disreputable but that we notice it only in the fall when the leaves comes down and nature’s disarray is combined with our own. Could be. In my yard are plastic gallon milk bottles that I use to gather water in the summer from the rain barrels or from running the taps to get hot water. But there is nothing much to water from October on, yet here are my two dozen jugs, mostly filled with water, standing around without a chore in the world to occupy them and no reasonable place to sit. Leaf rakes are strewn here and there because leaf rakes have a short life span but even when their life span is shortened they still have some use when the leaves are cascading down. A leaf rake that has, e.g., only a 2-foot handle can still be used in small areas. The hoses are still uncoiled as if something was going to be sprinkled in just a few minutes, but the fact is that we are close to turning the outdoor water off for the winter, at which point the hoses will be disconnected entirely and otherwise useless. Nevertheless, they continue to wend their weary ways across the yard.

Indoors, there is more order in the parlor and sitting room and other household rooms; at least there is until you come to the rooms where all the real stuff gets done. In my case, it’s the quilting workshop; in Ed’s, it’s the computer room. Here the Lord of Misrule is a permanent resident, as if I were conducting an endless, medieval Christmas pageant. I’ve tried boxes, I’ve tried shelves, I’ve tried fancy wire shelves with drawers, specialized containers, all of it. I bring in tabletops and within minutes the tabletops are covered with things that really should be in the boxes, shelves, and drawers, but they’re already full. I daresay I’ve tried everything but just throwing it all out, which I cannot do because I might need it some day. Well, given the coming recession, my depression training might just be the right response. I might indeed need it some day, or somebody might need it and there’ll be no more easy getting it because we will not have the spare cash, or the prices will be too high because the Chinese will have stopped working for us at very low wages.

Perhaps the bigger or better question is Why Care? Is this yet one more puritanical inheritance that I could do without? As long as Ed can find the papers and computer parts he needs in the stack of papers and computers and computer parts that cover his floor and tabletops, what does it matter that the floor and tables are not free for tap dancing? As long as mice are not nesting in my boxes and bags and drawers of fabric and thread and wool, what matter is it that I cannot navigate a straight line from one end of the room to the other; I am not, after all, driving through the room.

Well, it matters to some. For example, here is advice number 2 (of 4) from an expert: ‘2. Be Ruthless When Throwing Old Items Out - Don't allow sentiment or desires to hoard to get in the way of clearing things out when you declutter your house. Be ruthless with your cleaning and you will see some amazing results.’ Perhaps so, but I suspect I want sentiment and desires to hoard to be a part of me. The very fact that I want that is what keeps my workroom in the shape it’s in. If I were someone else without those qualities, my world would doubtless be neater. That may be enough of a conclusion for me to cart outdoors another bunch of flattened tin cans which live in an outdoor box for flattened and increasingly rusted tin cans. I've got a project in mind for them, if I just live long enough to get it done. Maybe in the spring, when I’ve tidied the workroom up a bit.

I'm Not Organizing Sox

When I was in California, last week, I took some time to read Barak Obama’s Dreams from My Father, which gave me some more sense of who the guy is. But what interested me more, in some ways, was his recounting of his 3-year experience as a community organizer in Chicago after he graduated from college.

I’ve been reading about community organizing since the 60’s, I’d say, and I always thought of it vaguely as something like organizing a labor union. Or maybe organizing anything—your children, the sox in your drawer. But I never really thought about the nitty gritty of it. That is, you try to organize workers, you already know what it is they have in common: they are workers and they are not management. You organize your children, and you have some previously established authority, as difficult as it may be to get them to follow your lead. You organize your sox in a drawer, they stay where they are put.

Organizing a community, by contrast, is quite different. It requires attempting to get people to figure out what their common interests might be when there is no previously-defined common interest, no community necessarily other than in your head; when you have no authority to do anything at all, and no one has any reason to go where you put them or to stay there once they’ve been put there. Probably more like the much-quoted job of herding cats when the cats didn't ask to be herded. And what interests me about this is that, after reading about Obama’s experience in Chicago, I realized that community organizing is what the Point Roberts Community Council is trying to do, even if it doesn’t necessarily think of it in those words.

At the last meeting, the ‘Council’ voted to change its name to the Point Roberts Community Association. The general rationale was that ‘Council’ sounded too much like an elected, representative group, and nobody had elected any of us to do anything and we represented people on the Point in only the vaguest of ways. So, now we’re an Association, which makes us something that anyone who lives in Point Roberts can join. We are choosing to associate with one another because we have some common interests. And because we have some common interests, we have the beginnings of a discrete community, even if, at the moment, it’s only the community of the Point Roberts Community Association. One common interest that this small community identified was a need to improve the Community Events sign on the main street. And, with some group work now completed, a new Community Events sign will soon appear. Results!

The next task, then, is to find out if other Point Roberts’ residents have other common interests and whether they and the community of the Association might join together and find some way to advance a common cause. It's baby steps, but I think I’m learning.