Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [72]
During my final year of my first degree, I had to complete a term of student teaching. I did this at a school near my hometown. That was good—I saved a term’s worth of rent by living at home. Unfortunately, the student teaching term was in the fall semester; thus, after Christmas I had to return to college midway through a normal school year. That was bad—I had nowhere to live.
To my good fortune, I had nice friends. They let me move into their apartment at a greatly reduced rent. I would throw a mattress on the floor of one of the rooms and all would be well.
We forgot to factor in my snoring.
After the first night on the floor, my new roomie said, “This isn’t going to work. You snore like a water buffalo.”
Now I had a dilemma. I needed a place to stay, but I didn’t want to inconvenience the very friends who had granted me shelter in my time of want. It was then that I noticed the closet.
The apartment, a two-bedroom on the bottom floor of an aging building, had a strange configuration. The design of the building meant that the closet in the front hallway was approximately three feet by six and a half feet deep. I considered my dilemma, thought of my snoring-averse friend and meager rent, and decided that this particular closet looked like a very small room. Miraculously, my single mattress fit perfectly. It was fate.
Truth be told, I can’t remember how long I actually slept in the closet. I do remember upgrading to the couch at some point. The closet, however, remained, in essence, my room.
Living in a closet is a unique experience. There is a certain womblike comfort to being encased by walls, a sense of coziness. On the other hand, there is literally no way to roll out of bed. When I got up in the morning, I had to squirm down to the end of the mattress and more or less eject myself.
The closet was also a bit of a date killer. I’m not saying that I was trying to pick up girls and bring them home (not while my mother is alive to read this book), but even bringing a date back for dinner, a drink, or a movie all had to happen in the knowledge that they would almost certainly ask, “So which room is yours?”
The biggest problem, however, was the cleanliness. It is difficult to maintain even a college dorm room level of cleanliness in a closet. Hardly Better Homes and Garden.
As I have matured, so have my living quarters. From closet to apartment to marital apartment, I passed through the stages of life as I climbed the evolutionary ladder of Cleanliness. There remains, however, a certain amount of the closet dweller in me. There is still a little “closet” in my house.
I don’t mean that my house is unclean, at least no more so than any house that shelters three young children; it’s just that there seems to be a lot more stuff than there needs to be.
I did not view this as a reason for surrender. Rather, I embraced Cleanliness. Unlike Moderation, I believed that it offered the opportunity for a concrete change in my behavior. Perhaps it is my nature as a pragmatist. My need for concrete results may simply be a virtual hangover from the more abstract concepts of Moderation and Justice. Cleanliness was something I could sink my teeth into.
Indeed, for the first time in weeks, I had a concrete plan of action. Borrowing from my week of Order, I decided to attempt to enforce organization on my personal space. I would sift, sort, discard, gift, and otherwise divest myself of those items of clutter that had been with me longer than my children (note of clarification—I had no plans to discard my children).
There was, unfortunately, an enemy in the camp in this virtue—a spy for the forces of pack rats.
As you might recall from the chapter on Order, my mother refuses to discard things. She doesn’t collect garbage; she just does not believe in “out with the old, in with the new.” In this age of overflowing landfills, she never seems to throw anything out. (I think it is important for me to stop and note that my mother keeps a very clean house; she is in no way unclean—she just keeps stuff ). When