Second Thoughts About the Closet

A few more thoughts about this closet idea.

Last week I wrote about getting organized enough to actually accomplish something. The key seems to be “Don’t store things until it’s time to throw them away.”

I collect wrinkled clothes in a hamper, then they’re in the way so I put them in a box, then the box is sitting in the corner of the bedroom for too long so it goes in the closet, and eight years later I unpack it and there’s Ed’s dress shirt.

I collect bills in a pile, then put them in a shoebox, then stuff it in the closet (usually because people are coming over and I want things to look neat), and years later I find the box and throw it away. (I do SO pay bills, it’s just that sometimes I wait for the yellow envelope to come.)

And then there’s the aging-food-in-the-refrigerator-until-it’s-time-to-throw-it-away-system.

So there is a little pattern here. Collect the most important resources in your life – food, clothing, electricity-phone-water-insurance – and put them in the closet until they’re out-of-date and unusable and it’s time to throw them away.

That’s a complicated idea, or maybe it’s just that it’s always hard for me to think about the truth. I like self-delusion as much as the next person, so it’s taken me a long time to start to think about this. Until “halfway through my first century,” is how I believe I put it last week, and you want to talk about self-delusion?

I’m starting to think that this goes deeper than storing food, clothing and shelter until it’s time to throw it out.

When my laryngologist told me that my vocal structure was broken, perhaps permanently, and that I might never sing again, I really did laugh and say to him, “At one point that would have been devastating news, but not at this point in my life. I don’t use my voice anymore anyway.”

I loved teaching fifth grade. I loved conducting choirs. When I lost my job in the public schools, I dove into being a housewife as if picking up other people’s messes and doing their thinking for them was a noble profession and made up for losing the joy of helping people find their true selves and expressing them fully.

After years of writing in hardbound journals and filing them in a bookcase in my attic, I stopped. I couldn’t find the time.

(Maybe it was in a box in the closet?)

No. Not time, exactly, but I have been storing something away in the closet, in a box, until it had aged enough to be thrown away.

Me.

My voice. My singing, writing, conducting and teaching. How many times have I said to myself, “I’m getting older now. I need to get ready to retire – although I’m not sure from what. It’s time to become contented with a smaller life.”

Have a small day tomorrow, and a smaller day the next day.

I read yesterday that the ancient Celts and Teutons believed in a great wheel of time, which they called Houl – a wheel that alternately threw its light toward the world and then away from it. For twelve days at winter Solstice, this Houl – now we call it Yule -- stood still before casting light onto the earth again.

Maybe it’s time for me to climb out of the box. As Woody Guthrie sang, “When you find me in the mailbox, cut the string and let me out!”

It’s time to let myself out of the back closet. Time to catch a ride on that Ferris wheel and ride back into the light. Publish the stories, conduct the choir, take this show on the road.

Welcome Yule!