Bow Tie o’ the Day’s rad sunglasses see the future. On the other hand, my jeweled reading glasses help me read about the past. Suzanne uses the same pair of reading glasses to see what she’s sewing or crocheting or otherwise crafting. We do not wear them at the same time. We have a bunch of pairs hiding around the house like Easter eggs. Whoever needs a pair, grabs the first pair they can locate. It’s not like we intentionally hide them though. I have no idea why it’s always difficult to find a pair when you need one, but you nearly trip on the trail o’ many reading glasses around here when you don’t need any help with your vision. They are everywhere. Until they disappear.
I have posted about this “here-one-minute,-gone-the-next” phenomenon before, but it still mystifies me on an almost daily basis– because it goes beyond glasses. This happens with scissors, and wrapping tape, and cough drops. It happens with matches and with toothpicks. It happens with flashlights, candles, and bandaids. And so on. We know we have a million of each thing but we can’t find a single one when we need it, so we buy more of it. And five minutes after we get home from the store, we almost immediately come across what we had spent hours scouring the house to find. It was sitting right by the television the whole time, where even Ray Charles could have seen it.
We are dopes! We are dopes with so much stuff we can’t keep track of it. Really, we can’t keep track of things we regularly use– like reading glasses and scissors. Not finding what we have plenty of should be a hint to us to pare down a bit. Here are my new arranging-the-house-stuff guidelines: IF AN ITEM DOESN’T HAVE A SPECIFIC PLACE WHERE IT BELONGS IN THE HOUSE, IT GOES. It never comes back either. And it doesn’t just go live in the garage until we can finally decide what to do with it. IF AN ITEM HAS UNNECESSARY DUPLICATIONS, THE EXTRAS GO. And they never come back.
Having made these new rules, I freely admit there will be exceptions. I am, in fact, keeping all the tape, scissors, and reading glasses. And I am keeping the 7– count ’em, 7– copies of T.S. Eliot’s THE WASTE LAND. Why do I need that many copies of any book? Same reason I have kept my copies of the Scriptures I’ve accumulated over the years. When I read anything, I underline; highlight; make notes in the margins; and flip around to find certain references– until the pages are filled up and/or fragile. Time for a new one!
I don’t get rid of the old battered book, because it’s a kind of journal. My underlining and highlighting and margin notes show me what I was thinking about– what was of concern to me– during the time I read that particular copy of the book. The margin notes I wrote in the Triple Combination I packed around in high school are different from what I noted in the copies that followed– right down to my newest Triple Combo that currently sits atop the stack of books in the bathroom. Reading through the different notations I have made in each successive copy of my Scriptures (or of any book) is part of how I can tell I’ve grown up.
