When I was growing up, I always thought that one day I would have my own catchphrase. Not something lame like “What you talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?” but something cool, something more along the lines of Oscar Wilde’s “I can resist anything except temptation.” What I ended up with, however, was a catchphrase that even Gary Coleman can look down his (tiny little) nose at: “Are you saving this?”
“Are you saving this?” is what I say as I follow the rest of my family around the house, trying to make sense of the trash they shed behind them like a molting dumpster.
“Are you saving this?” to my son, Clyde, when he carefully unwraps his popsicle and places the wrapper on the pillow next to him.
“Are you saving this?” to my daughter, Clementine, when she carefully mounds her orange peels on the windowsill at breakfast.
“Are you saving this?” to my husband, even, when he thoughtfully brings in the mail and then piles it up–carpet cleaning offers, dog washing coupons, lawn care advertisements and all–in a heap on the kitchen table. (The carpet cleaning and lawn care I can almost see–after all, it is quite possible that either a carpet or a lawn could be down there somewhere–underneath the piles of junk mail, perhaps–but you’d think that, by now, he would have noticed that we no longer have a dog.)
When they answer this question, as they always do, in the negative, then my second catchphrase comes into play: “Then throw it away!”
To hear their side of it, of course, they are only “waiting” to throw these things away. Waiting for what, I ask–evolution? I hate to break it to them, but even if their trash evolved at the rate of fruit flies it would still be decades before it got up enough gumption to meander into the trash can on its own. Then again, maybe they’re waiting for me–waiting for me to glide along after them like a well-trained butler, conscientiously whisking away crumbs, dirty socks and coupons for half-price colonoscopies.
The trouble is, they’re probably right to wait: when it comes to the game of “clutter chicken,” I will always be the first to blink, because I have an almost pathological horror of it. I know that this must come as a big surprise to anyone who has ever actually been inside my house, but it’s true: I despise cutter. The closest I can come to explaining this apparent discrepancy between the way I live and the way I think is the same way Evelyn Waugh explained the discrepancy between his being a devout Catholic and an utter jerk: “Imagine how much worse I would be if I wasn’t one.” (A Catholic, that is–for him. An anti-clutter nut for me.)
My fear of clutter probably comes from when I was younger and had a friend whose mother one day decided to stop throwing things away. I remember being astonished at the speed at which a normal family house could go from being a little messy to Grey Gardens. It made quite an impression on a younger me: to my eyes it seemed as if literally one day you could leave the newspaper lying on the table amongst the breakfast dishes, and the next there would be livestock in the living room. (In their defense I must acknowledge that they–like everyone else in the neighborhood–lived on a farm, and so it wasn’t as if the livestock had to do a great deal of traveling.) Still, everyone else somehow managed to keep their chickens from laying eggs on top of the TV Guide.
Which reminds me: I guess there really could be worse catchphrases out there than “Are you saving this?” Like, “Is this your chicken?”