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We’ve all heard about how easy it is to send the wrong signals and even give offense when we’re visiting other cultures: everyone knows, for example, that the same hand gesture that means “peace” in America looks remarkably similar to the one that means “sod off!” (or words to that effect) in the U.K. And let’s not even get into all the ways you can offend someone with a simple handshake: too strong, too weak, wrong hand; in fact, given that handshakes evolved as a means of showing others our peaceful intentions it is somewhat ludicrous that there are so many different ways for them to do just the opposite.

And yet, even beyond handshakes there are so many different ways to offend others that a whole industry has arisen to teach us how not to. Worried about that upcoming trip to the Far East? No problem: simply pick up a handbook on Eastern etiquette and find out beforehand that it would be extremely offensive for you to touch a monk on the head with your foot while visiting Thailand. (Although, if you have to be told that’s it not ok to touch anyone–anywhere–on the head with your foot, then you probably shouldn’t be allowed to walk out your own front door on your own, let alone travel to foreign countries).

Still, even with the availability of all these books and instructional DVDs, when it comes to successfully interacting with “the other” we still manage to get it wrong. In fact, some of us are so inept that we contrive to offend the “other” on a daily basis–twice a day, sometimes, if we have to drop them off and pick them up from school. I am speaking, of course, of the most “other” other there is–our children–because, while it may be possible to learn enough hand signals and foot etiquette to get along when you visit Britain or Thailand, we have no hope of success when it comes to visiting the land of our offspring.

It took me a while to fully comprehend this: for a long time I believed that all our communication difficulties were simply a part of the generation gap. (After all, I thought, what point of reference is there between someone who thinks “soon” means “in the next two seconds” and someone who believes it means “within the next year–maybe”?)

After a while, though, I realized that our misunderstanding were too great to be explained by any mere age difference, and started to believe that they must, instead, be part of something much bigger–like a political problem. [It made sense: when the proletariat (that would be us–the people who are earning the money) and the aristocracy (that would be them–the people who spend the money) are all sleeping under the same roof it is somewhat inevitable that every morning will start out like a revolution.]

Finally, though, I came to my current position: that just as has been true of nearly every conflict that has rocked this planet since Captain Cook first got eaten for having the temerity to ask for his hammer back , this one, too, was a clash of cultures. At the time I came to this conclusion I believed that it was actually a good thing, because, as I mentioned before, the catalog of books written on understanding other cultures is practically endless. Surely, I thought, there must be an out-of-work cultural anthropologist out there somewhere who has written at least one book on understanding the strange culture that lives within our own homes?

Apparently, alas, the answer is : no.

I guess that it’s a lot easier creating a guide to England than one to Childland, which is unfortunate, because a lot less rides on our ability to understand the English–for one thing, they’re not the ones who get to decide which nursing home we go into.

As much as I despise reality shows, I have to admit that, a lot of the time the people appearing on them actually receive something of value in return for being humiliated on national television. The “guests” of How Clean is Your House get someone else to scrub the fifteen-year-old pee stains from around the base of their toilet (both kinds–those that have been there for fifteen years, and those that were made by a fifteen-year-old). Extreme Makeover participants get a new face, a new body, or a new house. And even the spouses on Wife Swap get a break from their (usually) highly annoying mates, if only for a little while. Those considerations aside, however, the byproduct of most reality shows is shame, humiliation, and mockery, which is why I have never been tempted in the least to appear on one of them. After all, I can easily get all the scorn and mocking I ever need (and then some) without ever having to leave the comfort of my own home: I have a preteen daughter. And, as everyone knows, living with an (almost) twelve-year-old girl is, at best, like being on a reality show with a particularly ill-tempered host; at worst it’s like signing up for one of those tough-love self-improvement boot camps–the kind where all of the counselors end up getting arrested for abuse.

In the reality show of my life, the day starts with host Clementine opening the dryer to see if her favorite threadbare pair of jeans (the ones I had to pry out of her sleeping fingers the night before to get them into the washer) are dry yet. When she realizes that even after six minutes of intense drying they are still wet ( we have yet to upgrade to a dryer with the new “thermonuclear” setting) she shuts the door in disgust and announces that “we need to get a new dryer.” Now, if this were, in fact, a genuine reality show, this would be the point where my shame at owning such a substandard appliance would be ameliorated either by looking under my seat to find a certificate for a new dryer from Oprah, or by seeing Ty Pennington wheeling one in on a dolly. Needless to say, neither occurs.

Next up: our host opens up the dishwasher to get a bowl for her cereal and discovers that the cereal stalactites that had fused to the bowl as it sat under her bed for three full days are still attached to the bowl today (again: we have yet to upgrade to the new “hydrojet” model). “We need a new dishwasher.” (Again: Oprah and Ty are notably absent.)

The trend continues throughout the day as the dining room table (too old), the computer (too slow), the car (too dirty), the house (too small) and the weather (too windy) are all held up to scrutiny (and found lacking)–and yet–time after time– no replacement ever appears. Just when I am beginning to think that this must be one of the worst reality shows ever, suddenly the lens is no longer pointing at my house and all my pathetic possessions, but instead is focused firmly on me, and I realize that this is not one of the worst reality shows ever–it is the worst.

Again, host Clementine starts the ball rolling.

“What’s up with the nerd sweater?”

“Boy, your teeth sure are yellow.”

I keep waiting for the commercial break, so we can finally get away from the criticism part and into the helping part when I realize that that half of the show hasn’t been written yet; in fact, given the not-so-benevolent nature of the host, it probably never will be. Just not high enough ratings, I guess.

Way back when I was in college, I took a class in dramatic criticism–I thought it might come in handy someday if I ever decided to start writing plays. However, as nearly twenty years have passed since then without my having felt the slightest urge to become a playwright, I eventually put the class–and all I learned from it–out of my mind. In fact, if I thought about it at all it was only to reflect that Dramatic Criticism had turned out to be a class on the same par with Invertebrate Zoology, Calligraphy and Hebrew for Travelers (to name just a few of the eclectic jumble of classes I took throughout my long college career). In other words: it turned out to be a class that, while interesting enough at the time, proved to be, in the end, almost wholly unusable. Or so I thought.

Oy vey, was I ever wrong on that one: although I have yet to be called upon to correctly name the class and order of some poor spineless creature, let alone to illuminate a copy of the Torah, my training as a drama critic has actually been needed on a more than daily basis. In fact, I am usually treated to at least one dramatic performance every single day–two or three on weekends (not including matinees). That’s right: I’m the mother of a preteen girl.

Like most drama critics, I have found that the perks are few and the hardships many. Sure I get to see first run performances for free, but believe me: for every brilliantly original piece of work that comes along (like last year’s Today, I Shave Off My Eyebrows) I have to sit through literally dozens of hackneyed performances of old chestnuts such as You Like Him Better Than Me and I Wish I Had Never Been Born. Off off off Broadway would be putting it mildly: some of this material is so bad that even Martin Lawrence would turn up his nose at it.

The worst part of it is, though, that even as bad as the performances sometimes get, I can’t walk out on them. After all, if I did, where would I go? My living room is the main stage, my kitchen the studio theatre, and even my bathroom has been pressed into use as an avant-garde “black box” space.

And the really worse part of it is that I know from painful experience that things will only get worse. I don’t even need all those parents of grown daughters telling me with barely concealed schadenfreude to “just wait until she’s a teenager”–I know because, perversely, I’ve already had to live through this once before with the person who could easily be Clementine’s doppelganger (or vice versa): my older sister, Kim.

My sister was such a successful drama queen that she ended up getting her degree in Theatre from ASU. And while it was apparent to everyone from the start that this would be the route she would take, it certainly didn’t make it any easier for me. I mean: you try and share a bathroom with a thirteen-year old version of Lady Macbeth. It was a nightmare, and one that I had thought I had put behind me once we both grew up and moved into our own houses.

Granted, Clementine has not yet reached the grand levels my sister did when she was in her prime. There have been, as yet, no “Out, damn spot!” moments (although there have been times–such as when she rails against my habit of buying whatever brand is on sale–when her “Out, damn generic!” has come very close). Still, as everyone keeps gleefully informing me, “just wait”–she’ll get there eventually. And when she does, then I’ll really have something to kvetch about.

My goal this winter–as it has been every winter for the past decade–has been to not get cited for child neglect. This is not as easy as it sounds, since ever since she has been able to take off her own clothes Clementine and I have been in a constant battle about what to wear in the winter. Traditionalist that I am, I tend to insist on old-fashioned things like coats, hats and gloves; Clementine, however, goes for the more minimalist look: jeans and a short-sleeved t-shirt for every occasion, no matter what. (Actually, this outfit would probably work for her if only I would go along with her other winter idea, which is for me to not only drive her everywhere she needs to go, but to be in a constant state of readiness–preferably in the car with the heater running.)

The funny thing is that, while I know that for many girls the refusal to wear clothes in the wintertime is the sign of being a fashionista, in Clementine’s case it is actually the sign of being a nihilist. What’s the point of trying to keep warm anyway? To her credit, at least she is fairly consistent in this philosophy. Why bother cleaning my room? and It doesn’t matter if I eat breakfast before the AIMS test being just two more examples of her devotion to the cause. Of course, when I respond to her comment against the wearing of warm clothing by positing that there must be some point to it–after all, you don’t see a lot of naked people on top of Everest–her nihilism segues into it’s natural companion–skepticism–and she replies “Mom, they have to wear coats on Everest–otherwise, how else would they ever be able to display all of their sponsors’ logos?”

For many years I was willing to accept her arguments against warm clothing as just another part of childhood, like vegetable loathing and soap and hot water avoidance, and was therefore willing to cut her some slack. After all, I thought, kids will be kids. But then–unfortunately for her–her little brother Clyde came along, and Clementine’s clothing fetish was exposed for the aberration that it is.

If Clementine is a nihilist, then Clyde must be a student of Leibniz– he certainly believes that this is the best of all possible worlds. And, when his “best possible world” happens to include snow, and therefore gloves, he is even happier, because obviously hands and gloves were made for each other. (Whether or not he is such a Panglossianist that he believes that hands were made with five fingers because that is the number of fingers on a glove is not yet clear.)

Even without the philosophical differences, though, I suspect that Clyde would still be easier to dress, because, above all, he is a regular guy, and therefore has the regular guy’s approach to clothing–in other words: just tell me what to wear. I could send him out the door in a parka in July or swim trunks in December, and, as long as neither of them were pink, he would stoically accept my decision.

The place where Clyde really blows it for Clementine, however, is in the matter of shoes. Case in point: he’ll wear them. (Again, whether this is because he believes that feet were designed to be shod is not yet known.) Clementine, on the other hand, true to her philosophy, insists that wearing shoes is of no help; although the sight of her hopping about on one foot and saying “Ow, ow, ow,” would seem to put the lie to that. Then again, the fact that most of her shoes stay hidden in some remote corner until they no longer fit is always there to reinforce her precious beliefs once more. After all: Nothing ever really fits, anyway.

In all my years of television viewing, I never thought that I would ever see something quite as boring as the Superbowl. As far as I am can tell, the Superbowl consists of approximately 17 days of pre-game “show,” 40 hours of beer commercials, and about 6 minutes of actual football–five of those minutes actually being commentary on the remaining minute of play. (I’m surprised they don’t bring out a psychic to get the ball’s point of view.) In fact, between all the hullabaloo over halftime shows, new commercials, and $2000 tickets, they should probably rename the Superbowl the “Hyperbowl.” (Superbowl, indeed. Why so shy? Why not the Galacticbowl, or the Ultimate-Mega-Ginormousbowl? Or for that matter, why not the Football World Cup? After all, I’m sure the other 5 ½ billion people on the planet would understand.)

However, as I said before, even though I had heretofore never thought to see something quite as dull as the Superbowl, this year I was proven wrong when, during the most recent showing I elected to stay home with Clementine while the rest of the family went off to enjoy the “fun” at a friend’s house. For some reason–perhaps it was guilt at dodging the Superbowl bullet– in a moment of ill-placed graciousness I gave Clementine control of the clicker–and here my troubles began.

Immediately she settled on a program called The Puppy Bowl. The Puppy Bowl consisted of half a dozen puppies running around a football stadium-themed exercise kennel. Every now and then one of the puppies would do what puppies do best and a human “referee” would have to step in to clean up the “foul,” all the while touting some kind of miraculous pet stain removal product, which I can only assume was the sponsor of the show. Once the mess was cleaned up, the human would step off-screen (presumably to call up his agent and fire him), and the puppy bowl would continue. And continue. And continue. For seven hours, of which Clementine watched at least five. She would flip around during the “dull” moments (how could she tell?) and check out other shows such as My Small Breasts and I (no, I didn’t just steal that title from The Onion; it’s a real show).

However, no matter how enthralling the tribulations of the tiny-chested were (sample lament: “I can’t go out because I’m afraid people will look at my small breasts”), Clementine kept going back to The Puppy Bowl. And not because, like me, she was wondering how, exactly, it fit in with the “All Empires Eventually Decline” theory (personally, on the Roman model I would put The Puppy Bowl after the invention of the aqueduct, but before it became fashionable to serve your dinner guests heaping platters of hummingbird tongues), but because she actually enjoyed it. Which presented a problem I had never before considered: if she is entertained by this stuff now, how am I ever going to be able to tell if she’s on drugs?

In my day, being over the age of four and voluntarily watching Teletubbies was a pretty good indication that you were patronizing an alternative pharmacist, and yet here was Clementine, willingly watching something that made Dipsy, Tinky-Winky, La La and Po look like finalists for the Nobel Prize in Economics. I mean, if I can’t count on watching for vapid behavior to clue me in to potential drug use, what’s left? Watching for things like moodiness and being socially withdrawn? With a teenage girl that would be kind of like standing by a river and watching to see if the water was getting any more wet.

Still, I guess it could be worse–she could’ve gone with the boys to watch–and enjoy–the Superbowl. If that had happened I wouldn’t just be worrying about potential drug use–I’d be worrying about potential brain death.

Back when I was able to stay up late enough to watch The Daily Show (which, actually, was back before The Daily Show was even around), I used to be able to close down the bars. I’d be one of those people hanging out until the last possible minute, dawdling over a pitcher while the band packed up, the cocktail waitresses started flipping on the lights (bar patrons and cockroaches being the only creatures that interpret bright lights as a sign that the party is over), and finally, the bartenders began to yell.

“All right now, that’s it; everybody out–we’re closed. Come on–we’re closed. Everybody out. Time to leave. Time to go. Good-bye. Out! Get out!”

Sure enough, ten minutes or so later, I’d leave, but not without thinking: Boy, throwing out a bunch of uncooperative drunks has got to be the lamest job ever. I’m sure glad that isn’t me. Fast forward fifteen years: I’m still directly involved in the process of people being shoved out of doors, but now I am one of the shovers, and the shov-ees are none other than my very own children, Clementine and Clyde. However, instead of this experience making me emphasize with the bartenders of my youth, it actually makes me a little bit jealous of them, because, after all, not only did those bartenders have bouncers to fall back on when things got really bad, they also only had to get people to stop drinking; I have to get people to go to school.

Also, unlike most bartenders, I have to start initiating eviction proceedings 90 minutes before school begins. And I’m not talking about issuing a generic order to “get ready for school”–I mean I have to go down a checklist that includes such minutia as “Find your socks. Turn off the TV. Put on your socks. Turn off the TV. Put one sock on each foot. Turn off the TV. Now put on your shoes. Ok, then find your shoes–no, they’re not inside the TV. Now put them on. Ok then, put your socks back on. Then find them. Who turned on the damned TV?” And so on, until the magical time of 8:10 appears on the clock, and everyone traipses merrily off to school. (Once I have successfully gotten them to leave the house I feel I have earned the right to imagine them any way I like–even if that means imagining them as two smiling, apple-cheeked siblings heading off to school in Rockwellian bliss–complete with a pair of blue birds twittering above their heads).

Of course, what really happens is that at 8:10 I’m standing at the door like the loneliest member of the relay team, holding out the baton that no one wants to take.

“Come on, it’s 8:10, time to go!” I yell, only to have Clyde call back from the kitchen that he has changed his mind–he’ll take a packed lunch after all–and Clementine call from the computer to say that, by the way, she needs a little bit more information for her report on Tripoli that’s due this morning. For starters: what, exactly, is a Tripoli?

At this point my vision of them on their way to school is starting to looking a lot more Edvard Munch than Norman Rockwell–forget the blue birds of happiness twittering above their heads, I’d settle for a pair of ravens fighting over a moldy chalupa if it meant that they were actually out the door.

And that’s when the bartender’s ultimate advantage occurs to me, because, no matter how frustrated I get, I’m still not allowed to use the bartender’s final and most effective encouragement to get lingering patrons to vacate the premises: “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

This morning on the BBC they announced that there are currently 62 Legos for every one human on the planet; if anyone feels that their share of this Lego bounty is not enough, take my Legos. Please. And while you’re at it, take my husband’s, too. And, most especially, please take my children’s.

Not that they have that many Legos to take, because, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned numerous times in this space before, I hate Legos. I don’t dislike them; I am not annoyed by them; I hate them. I hate them all the way from their primo infancy right through their duplo adolescence to their fully formed adult Lego selves. And yes, I know that in this I am not unique: many people have expressed the same legophobia (misolegogy?) that I do, but I would like to believe that my reasons for hating Legos are a little bit unique.

You see, what I hate about Legos is not their multitudiniousness; while it is true that I intensely dislike the way they can quickly come to fill every concave surface in a house, multiplying faster than a Tribble, I do not hate that aspect of their existence. And I do not hate them because they are essentially nocturnal creatures that travel along unseen but long established migration routes that always seem to include my shoes; again, I intensely dislike this, but I do not hate it. And I certainly don’t hate them for their provenance. Although I know that after the great Danish cartoon flap of 2005 some Muslims urged a boycott of all things Danish (including Legos, blue cheese, and one can only hope, that awful canned ham), that is not the reason behind my own hatred of Legos. (If anything, that controversy almost made me do the unthinkable, and buy Legos in support of the Danes–I ended up doubling up on blue cheese instead). No, what I hate about Legos is how they always seem to come in creativity-numbing “sets.”

The Hogwarts set. The Star Wars set. The Lord of the Rings set. And how each set contains just enough Legos to complete the project pictured–just enough, and no more, so that once a crucial piece goes missing, the entire set gets poured into the ubiquitous Lego “stew.” Dumbledore got sucked up the vacuum? Two hundred grey “Hogwarts” pieces go into the pot. The blast doors on the rebel base at Hoth got flushed down the toilet? Three hundred white “snow” bricks go in. I realize, of course, that it is not supposed to be this way; the whole idea behind Legos is that they are supposed to encourage a child’s ability to play creatively and independently, so that, in theory, even without all the pieces to make one of the Lego “sets” a child will still be able to have hours of fun using the million of leftover bricks to build their “own imaginative world.”

In theory. Of course, what this theory fails to take into account is that these are kids that have been raised in a world where they sell the ingredients for S’mores already shrink-wrapped together. Where sock monkeys are made not out of a pair of old socks, but from Sock Monkey Craft Project Kits–socks included. Where all the materials needed to make “your own tree house” come together in one big box–shipped from China. I’m surprised that somebody hasn’t started selling bottles of water boxed up with a tray as “ice cube kits.”

What they really need to spark children’s creativity is to sell some kind of a Lego “Macguyver” set, where kids can gather up all of the leftover pieces of all their other sets and do something useful–or at least fun–with them. Then again, it’s probably against the law to sell propane torches to minors.

First, let me establish that I am not an unusually paranoid or self-centered person: whenever I hear a ringing payphone I don’t automatically assume that the call is for me, and whenever I hear a siren I don’t always think that I’m the one getting pulled over. What I absolutely cannot do, however, is hear the demanding bellow of a child and not think that it comes from one of my own, because, in my case, what they say is all too true: “Ask not for whom the child bellows; it bellows for thee.”

What is it about my kids and hollering? Both of them seem to be under the mistaken impression that even the longest and most in-depth of conversations can be conducted from opposite ends of the house, or even–if they happen to be visiting a neighbor– from opposite ends of the neighborhood. And I don’t mean the kind of desperate bellowing conversation that everyone has, on occasion, engaged in (surely even the Queen of England herself has found out too late that the bathroom she chose is completely toilet paper free). Nor do I mean the inarticulate whoops of delight you might use to get someone’s attention when you are speechless with laughter (like, for example, when they are replaying the clip of the President falling off of his Segway). No, what I’m talking about are discussions the length and depth of Plato’s dialogues, conducted in a bellow from 40 feet away.

Sometimes the discussions are more of the nature of a trivia quiz–these are the ones I usually am pulled into unwittingly, since, as a true trivia nerd, I cannot resist that first, simple, question.

“Mom!” comes a voice from what sounds to be a few blocks away. “Who were the Axis powers?” I know I shouldn’t, but the trivia hound in me can’t but help shouting out the answer as quick as I can (although the only person I might be competing against is a guy walking his dog down the street).

“I know! I know! Germany, Italy and Japan!”

“What?”

“Ger-man-y, It-a-ly, and Ja-pan,” I enunciate.

“Hungary, Ritalin and Thailand? Ritalin isn’t even a country.”

“NO. GER–”

“Never mind–I’ll ask Dad.”

Other times I am the one who naively gets these long-distance communications going by assuming (mistakenly), that if they have important information to impart, they will want to do so to my face.

“Clementine! Do you need lunch money?”

“(mumble mumble) Skor-bive?”

“What?”
“(mumble mumble) Skor-BIVE?”
“COME HERE!”

(Reluctantly appearing) “We’re going on a field trip today–I said you’d drive.”

The worst part is that, as I mentioned before, I have become so numb to the bellowing lifestyle that I now interpret any shout in my direction as simply a long-distance solicitation. My only hope is that this doesn’t end in tragedy; I’d hate to wander into the middle of a gunfight only to assume that the shouts I’m hearing from all directions are simply multiple requests from my children to get them a waterfowl as a pet.

Of all the adjustments I’ve had to make since becoming a mother, I think maybe the hardest one of all was adjusting to the fact that I am now a stereotype. With the birth of my first child I became not only a mother, but a “mother:” someone who drives a minivan (wait, this is Flagstaff–make that an SUV), has a horror of dirt, and petitions the local Wal-Mart to stop carrying Cosmopolitan because the covers are too racy. This despite the fact that I can still frequently be found hauling my mud-splattered kid around town in a twelve-year old bike trailer covered with Dead Kennedy stickers. The reality doesn’t matter: I am a “mother.” Suddenly I understand how frustrating it must be to be from West Virginia: you could be in the middle of explaining your doctoral thesis on astrophysics to someone and, without fail, they will probably interrupt you to ask “so, how’s your sister doin’?(wink, wink)”

Of course, within every stereotype there is a grain of truth, and in the case of the mothering one, that has certainly proved to be true. In fact, I think that the only thing that has proven to be more frustrating to me than having to explain to people that being a mother doesn’t automatically make you uptight and hysterical is when, right in the middle of this explanation, I find out that, sometimes, in fact, it does.

Such was the case when I heard about the recent controversy over the artwork hanging up in the deli at New Frontiers. It seems that some people want local artist Scott Martinson’s work taken down–not because it is badly done (it’s not), not because it’s overpriced (it is so not), but because they “don’t want their children exposed to it.” Hearing this made me feel just like the aforementioned astrophysicist must feel when she finds out that her cousins are getting married–to each other. In other words, a little bit sad and a little bit betrayed. And a little bit confused: what kind of mother doesn’t want her children exposed to art?

There are lots of things I don’t want my children exposed to: Bratz dolls; homophobia disguised as a “Defense of Marriage Act;” a president who thinks waterboarding is okay “in certain circumstances” (like when, I guess, they “really deserve it.”). But art has never been on that list. In fact, I’ve been known to actually pay money so that my children can be exposed to art (just in case those protesting mothers are reading this, those places are called museums). What’s more, I’ve even been known to pay more money so that I can bring a piece of art home and expose my children to it 24/7.

And as for the “offensive” pieces? Surely offensiveness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and any art that gets your attention is art that is doing its job; as writer Miguel de Unamuno said, “I’m not selling bread; I’m selling yeast.” Any doubts on that score were settled the last time I took my six-year old to an art museum: I couldn’t have made him spend an extra minute in front of Monet’s “Gardens at Givenchy” if I had nailed his feet to the floor, but once he saw 17th century artist Artemesia Gentileschi’s incredibly gory “Judith Slaying Holofernes,” he was all about art.

Of course, everyone has their own tastes (and their own limits):one man’s Frida Kahlo may be another man’s Norman Rockwell; still, it would be nice to think that even when someone feels the need to close their own eyes, they don’t also feel the need to deny their children the chance to have theirs’ opened, instead.

Scott Martinson’s art will (hopefully) be on display through the end of March at the New Frontiers deli, located at 1000 S. Milton Rd.

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?”