“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
--Albert Camus
In early March of 2020, another member of the Hillel staff and I drove to DC to accompany 16 students to a conference that was a part of our regular cycle of activities. During these conferences, I always stayed in my Maryland home. It saved the organization a few dollars on a hotel room and gave me a good excuse not to stay at the conference late into the evening for the long-winded political speeches in the massive, dark rooms that hosted the general sessions. At the conclusion of the conference, I walked with a group of students from the U.S. Capitol to the side street where the Hillel-owned Toyota Sienna, affectionately known as ‘Meatball,’ waited with my colleague Meg, who would chauffeur some of the students back to Rochester. After saying goodbye to the students and telling Meg about sixteen times to ‘drive carefully,’ I hopped on the red line and took the subway out to the Maryland suburb where I live. It didn’t occur to me that I would neither set foot in DC again for well over a year nor that I would never see most of those students again, at least not in the flesh.
I was already in my last few months as director of Hillel at the University of Rochester. My ‘interim’ stint which was supposed to go for a year or so had lasted five. Although it had been the most fun five years of my working life, I was ready to come home, and the board had found my successor. Her name was (and I am not making this up) Joy and she was to begin work in mid-June when I would officially step down. I had been looking forward to these last few months as a time to start packing up my things, saying goodbyes, and celebrating with colleagues and students what we had accomplished. A certain Yiddish phrase about what God does when humans plan comes to mind.
The following week was Spring Break so I had planned to stay in Maryland and then head back to Rochester the following Sunday. That was the week Covid blew up. By the time the next Sunday rolled around, it was becoming clear that students would not be returning from Spring Break and that my trip back to Rochester would just last a few days to grab the essentials and the tools I would need to work from home for what I imagined would be a month or two. Yes, I could have stayed in Rochester but working alone in my graduate student housing apartment didn’t seem to make much sense when all the students and the rest of the staff would be remote.
And so it happened that with several months still left to go in my work, I found myself back in Maryland. During the evenings and weekends after a day of Zoom calls and emails, I found that I no longer had justification to ignore the decluttering project begun more than five years earlier.
Of course, I had to start again. There were more books than ever and the clothes situation had gotten completely out of hand.
This time, I was tougher. Or perhaps my joy threshold had gotten significantly higher. Whatever the reason, I filled carton after carton with books and clothes to go to Goodwill. But now most of America was doing the same! Our local Goodwills were overrun and stopped accepting donations. I turned a spare bedroom into a makeshift collection center and stacked the boxes in there. It took only a week or two to get back to ground zero, and now it was time to tackle what Marie Kondo calls kimono, or miscellaneous junk.
As previously mentioned, it was everywhere: in the basement (4 rooms and a large storage closet), my son’s room (untouched since he had left for college seven years earlier), and of course the shed, now the sole dominion of spiders, snakes, birds and mice.
The KonMari method asks you to bring all the stuff in one category into one room and sort through everything at once. You are not supposed to declutter room by room. But this is simply impractical with the junk. There is too much of it. Also, are you really going to bring your lawn mowers into the living room? I decided I would need to go room by room and hope that Marie would not find out.
I had planned to try to sell some of the nicer items on eBay but found I didn’t have the energy to do it. Instead, set up a table at the end of our driveway and offered them for free to passersby. That Spring there were many couples and families out strolling and I enjoyed watching from the kitchen window as they stopped to examine the fine items on display. I could imagine the conversations.
“Hey, look at this!”
“What do you want with that?”
“I dunno. It could come in handy”
“We already have one.”
“Yeah, we could always use another.”
“We don’t need it!”
“True…” (takes it anyway).
The ‘spark joy’ test doesn’t work well with junk. Case in point: everyone needs a drill but for most, a drill does not spark joy. I kept a lot of joyless tools, household items, and desk accessories. A better test to decide whether to keep kimono than ‘does it spark joy?’ is ‘if I get rid of this will I just have to buy another one in a month?’ As I cleaned and organized the kimono, I collected items I came upon from the last category, sentimental objects and photos, and threw them in boxes in my office to review when their time came.
My son’s room required special attention. His old room was like a microcosm of the entire project. Clothes, books, toys, a ceramic pig full of coins! The room was more or less in the same state that it had been in when he left for college in 2013. Further, he was unwilling to either authorize me to get rid of it all or to come home from Colorado and deal with it. In the end, a lot of photos of his stuff were texted to him, and boxes filled with the things and books he wanted to keep. I took the coins to one of those machines, which takes ten percent and turns the rest into store credit. I used the store credit and sent my son the value through Apple Pay Cash. $115.67. He couldn’t believe that a ceramic pig could hold so much money. I think he invested it in cybercurrency.
Then last December, when we drove out to Colorado to have the van converted into a camper (our own Toyota Sienna, just like Meatball!), we filled empty cargo space (all but the front seats had been removed) with the last of both our children’s things. Then we delivered them right to their doorsteps! What great parents! Our kids were so grateful to be reunited with their belongings!
Goodwill started accepting donations again. I took two van loads and waited in a line of cars for 20 minutes each time to drop off the goods which included an ancient TV and a few old hard drives that contained e-wallets with $100,000 worth of bitcoin that I had purchased in 2011 and had forgotten about. (Just kidding. I think).
Then all that remained was the dread shed. I waited for the signal. That signal came in the form of an announcement in the town newsletter. Saturday, June 21, 2021 was to be the next ‘Bulk Trash Pickup’ day. I began my work on Wednesday of that week, removing every item from the shed and dumping it on the lawn. I disturbed a nest of mice living in one of the corners. I found accessories for the motorcycle I had sold the previous fall. I found pieces of a lawn mower I no longer owned. I emptied the shed to its bare walls and swept the old wooden floor boards clean. I put back the things that we needed to keep and hauled the rest to the curb where it was picked over by a succession of scavengers on foot, on bicycle, and finally in pick-up trucks. When I looked out Saturday morning, there was nothing left for the bulk trash pickup except an old grass catcher and some rotted roofing from an old sukka. Recycling at its most efficient. (Usually, I am among those strolling around the neighborhood looking for other people’s trash to make my treasure but I was too exhausted from my tidying to make the effort this year!)
Finally, the last category, Sentimentalia remained in boxes strewn about my office making it an environment unsuitable for even Zoom calls. It took me several more months until I was ready to face it.
This category consisted of letters from friends and family going back decades (70s and 80s and early 90s when all mail correspondence suddenly stopped for some reason), Matchbox cars and other toys from my childhood, and boxes of cassette tapes containing the pre-pubescent voices of myself, my sister, and my cousins from 50 years ago. I didn’t have a cassette player. I didn’t know if the cassettes would even play.
I knew I needed to toss the mildewed and smelly old tapes but first I had to find out if there was anything on them that could be retrieved. For about $30 I bought a gadget that promised to convert old tapes to a digital format. I had had good luck with another such device years ago when I converted my old VHS tapes to digital so I decided to give it a whirl. Amazingly, the 50-year-old tapes played perfectly! Using a free software program called Audacity, I converted all the tapes to digital files and stored them on my computer. There was a tape of me playing the bagpipes at college in 1979. There was a tape of my sister and I being silly. Also a snippet of my Grandmother’s voice saying, “How’d your mommy get to be so smart?” There were hours and hours of Kasey Kasem ‘countin’ ‘em down’ on America’s Top 40 program broadcast on AM radio, as well as more tapes of Dr. Demento. I didn’t transfer all of that.
The hardest thing I had to do was to drop those old tapes in the trash. I kept one or two and tossed the rest. Another month or two went by. I began to sort the rest of the stuff. I sorted the old correspondence into one box, photos into another, and random scraps and items into a third.
Marie says one should throw all this stuff away. Keep one or two photos and mercilessly chuck everything else.
I failed.
I sorted the correspondence by person but didn’t put the letters into chronological order. I need to leave something for my biographer to do! I filed them in large manila envelopes in my large sturdy four drawer filing cabinet I brought home on another bulk trash pickup day long ago. (The four drawers are labeled ‘Earth, Wind, Fire, Water,’ an homage to beloved college physics professor.
The photos all went in a box I labeled and stuck on a closet shelf.
Finally, I pondered the toys. Some of the things I posted on the town list serve and got some takers. There was a neighbor who wanted my HO model railroad trains from the 1970s. But in the end, I wasn’t able to bring myself to toss most of these keepsakes I had held onto for nearly 50 years. They too went in a box and stuck on a closet shelf. Likewise, the vinyl records I have no way to play remain in a box in the closet.
Finally, I vacuumed the floor in my office and straightened a few joy-sparking knick knacks on the coffee table. I was done! I glanced around the room pleased and satisfied with the conclusion of my nearly eight-year-long tidying project and thought how proud Marie would be of my accomplishment. As I did so my eye fell on the bookshelf. Somehow the number of books had proliferated in the last year; I saw that there was just a little more to do.
It was then that I spotted a man wearing only running shorts pushing an enormous bolder up my street. I ran out to him as he passed the house.
“Move over, Sisyphus,” I cried, “There’s gotta be room for two happy men behind that rock!”
