The Cat in the Hat and the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up

“What would you do if your mother asked you?”

This is the last sentence of the Cat in the Hat. It’s asked after, as you likely recall, Cat through acts of entertainment, causes exponential messes in the children’s house that get cleaned up in the nick of time. Mother walks in and asks Conrad and Sally, “What did you do while I was out?” 

I’ve had a Cat in the Hat morning. When stowing plates and bowls in cupboards, followed by a spatula and peeler in a utensil drawer, I found I could barely pull the drawer wide enough to get out a knife, let alone get at whatever was blocking its opening. Piece-by-piece I remove enough to dislodge the offending item… my nemesis, the sharp, pointy and painful meat thermometer that stabs regularly, no matter how deep I place it in the drawer. 

Having had way too many discussions lately about the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and rather than jam the damn thermometer in the back corner, I emptied the contents on two countertops and the kitchen table, and attempted to ask myself if any of the items bring me joy.  (It occurred to me at that moment that seeing all the stuff spewed everywhere is a stupid time to ask the question.)

I removed the five dividers and liner, washed them and reimagined the space. I moved one of the dividers containing openers and closers (rubber discs, can opener, cork screws, wine stops, etc.) to another drawer which had to be rearranged first, and before that, wiped clean. Skewers moved to a shelf high in a cupboard, risking oblivion, but better than discarding, I reasoned. The shelf below them held my mom’s box of recipes, which surfaced in a recent conversation about hot chicken salad with potato chips… a dish she served at a Coke-tail party before prom in 1969. Of course, I had to find the recipe. That led to photos, a text to my friend and eventually putting away the step stool in the laundry room.  

Damn, I’d been using the top of the dryer as an emergency holding area since the doorbell rung on Christmas Eve. It was piled with wrapping paper, a wood wine rack, a package to be shipped, dirty cloth napkins – the only items that should be there, an empty cat-toy box, a huge Tupperware full of bags of nuts and seeds, and bags, lots of bags… brown paper grocery bags, bags with nice handles and pretty sides, plastic bags thick enough for cat litter disposal, and bags to be recycled at the grocery store. Of course, it didn’t look as organized as I just described it; it looked more like the kitty’s litter box. 

“And this mess is so big 
And so deep and so tall, 
We cannot pick it up. 
There is no way at all!” 

I started a wash and cleared the top of the machines, which led me upstairs to the closet where my wrapping supplies are stored. I flipped. I jammed the tissue into the bag of rolls of happy paper, inside that disaster pit. I’d had enough. 

Returning to the kitchen, I easily reopened the now tidy kitchen drawer to grab the wine bottle-opener and discovered, in the last of the debris, an item offering true joy - a meat-thermometer sheath, free from Sur la Table, that forever renders my nemesis impotent. 

Conrad and Sally never answered mother.  Maybe neither would I. I didn’t accomplish one thing I had planned.

Nostalgia - You Are What You Were When and What You Choose to Be Now

I just got an email that has cute pictures and in poetic form tells all the things they miss about the nineteen-fifties, then asks me to send it to someone else who'd appreciate the memories.

I realized in reading it, I don't like those memories.

Those cliche' views leave out that women were relegated to staying home or could only get secretarial, teaching or nursing jobs, and African Americans had to sit in the back, couldn't eat in most restaurants, and feared being lynched. One couldn't marry someone of the same sex let alone show them affection. Education wasn't valued, men knew best, white people were all powerful and the United States was proud it dropped nuclear bombs. And, pedophilia, depression and anything else mental was seen as a personal fault not an illness.

I get the idea that we are who we were when, but I would relate to nostalgia better if it acknowledged the "and then... this evolved into that." I'd appreciate it if it noted that in time, change doesn't stop. Are they still wearing saddle shoes and wearing a pageboy or duck's ass? I mean everything they listed as contemporary will be just as old and past in twenty years anyway. I don't really like revering a time unless you can learn from it. We may rail against things not made as well now, but I'd rather have a cataract removed now than then... An hour in a chair in out patient suite vs three days in sand bags in a hospital... give me the good ole days... NOT.

I don't like nostalgia. Personally, I have no interest in making any of those times anything more than that... a place in time. I'd rather use my energy to make peace with today... to embrace all the things that have changed and live with integrity among them, to bring myself to understand the present, maybe try to make it better from the lessons that I learned from when I grew up. I'm so dismayed at seeing the fundamentalism that's trying to turn back time like in Indiana and around the world.

I still don't get why I feel different now that I am 60 from when I was 40. Ha! Sure, I can't get pregnant but I still have my whole life ahead of me to birth new things. I have to remind myself that it's okay to start things... even a business. I just may need a sooner than later succession plan. Thank goodness there's an app for that... probably.

There are years ahead. My watercolor painting reminds me daily that if I am at all normal, then I'll look back on the junk I'm doing now as the time I had to put in to get to where I will be then. My brother just bought something that requires classes and learning to be safe and to get good at it. That's inspiring. It's good to start something new. When my friends retired they picked up and moved to France. They started over... even language. That's more and more inspiring the closer I get to that time.

I find myself placing meaning on retirement that means shut down; that makes it seem to coincide with diminishment, but I don't know if or how that's going to happen... There's no sense in acting like it is inevitable or it's total incapacitation.

So, I’ve beat to death the idea that I really don't like nostalgia. The reality is, I do like to tell stories. So, my learning today is that I don’t want to be nostalgic for the sake of remembering. I want to remember so that the present and the future is worth remembering. 

Can’t get this outa my head:

• Pulling out from a blind spot on Lower Wacker the other night and a speeding Saab nearly banking into the wall because of me. 
• Walking to work on Pearson near the Lake one gorgeous May morning when an old woman walking a few feet ahead of me dressed in an ankle length black wool coat and pumps tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and fell nose first into the cement.
• The moment Oscar took his last breath as the vet administered the second shot.
• After months of minimal communication and weeks of  nourishment from a feeding tube, my dad’s smile in recognition of taste during a procedure where they placed orange sherbet on his tongue.
• The video of a baby elephant and its mother in Kenya running toward each other when the baby is freed from a well
• Though they didn’t tell me, knowing that when my parents took Debbie to be boarded while they were going on a trip, it would be the last time I’d see her. I told them I’d walk her to the corner where they could pick her up and I’d walk back home where the baby sitter waited. (No my parent's werent like that. Neither of my siblings were boarded. Debbie was the dog.)
• Taking a spill with my niece on the back of the bike in her carrier.
• My mother’s painted finger nails and the smell of Aphrodisia and cigarettes as she readied to go out for dinner with my dad.