Remember that old expression, “A place for everything and everything in its place”?  It seems so simple, so direct, yet never having achieved the first part in any situation, the second part has remained a mystery to me all my life.  

I don’t know what made me think of it this morning – unless it was yet another round of rifling through drawers and stacks of paper to find my keys.  A few months ago it could have been going through the painful process of replacing all of my credit cards when I thought I’d lost my wallet, only to find it in my sock drawer.

I’m the victim of poor organizational skills and absent-mindedness.  I do try to create a place for everything and then put things there.  Usually I only manage to make a place for a few really important things, letting everything else pile up, which works for a while.  I have a basket on my dresser into which dutifully (usually) drop my keys when I come home.  I often use it for my wallet, too – when I haven’t left it in my pants pocket or dropped it into a random bureau drawer.

But back to a place for everything.  I don’t have massive amounts of stuff.  I even did a purge when I moved from DC to San Francisco a couple of years ago.  Most of what I do have is still in storage, so it doesn’t enter into this discussion at all.  All that said I sometimes feel as though I live in a sty.  Not a dirty, food slathered pig pen; a crowded, cluttered conglomeration of stacks and piles and things stuffed in the nearest spot.  There’s just too much.

I’m not taking the entire rap for this, though.  While I don’t believe in blaming our parents for all of our problems in life, I know this is the direct result of the way I was raised.  Like my apartment, our house was never dirty.  But clutter was always a problem.  Luckily, while my mom was a keeper, my dad was a tosser.  It was a good match.  Keepers without tossers to keep them in check become hoarders and wind up on cable TV shows.

As an example, let me explain the Maltby family method of preparing for guests.  Our approach was simple:  clean the living room, dining room, kitchen and bathroom, then throw everything else into Mom and Dad’s bedroom and close the door.  Once the coast was clear everything could come tumbling back out.

Sometimes they’d tumble as far as the enclosed stairs to the second floor of the house.  These were usually stacked with games and clothes and such that Mom had asked my brother and sister and me to take up when we went.  Of course we seldom did until the stairs were impassable.  One morning I had to grab the overhang of the doorway and swing myself out over the piles to land in the hallway.  Sure I thought it was cool at the time.  But necessary?

As an adult, I can’t fathom living without junk drawers or, ideally, a junk room.  Where do you put all those little things that aren’t really like anything else?  Binder clips and Post-It pads and unused padlocks and rolls of Breath Savers and the combination lint brush/shoe buffer and the extra cables for my DVD player and that cool collapsible cork screw and the tiny spare parts from a million appliances and gadgets.  You can’t run down to The Container Store and get one of those nifty little separated boxes to put them in.  They’d still be an incoherent mishmash.  And seriously, do you know how much clutter those swell organizers create when they don’t actually do the job you bought them to do and then you can’t bring yourself to throw them away because they’re brand new and you figure a good use for them might pop up later?  Lots.  Trust me.  I’ve got desk organizers and silverware organizers and sock organizers and underwear organizers and God knows what other kinds of organizers stacked in storage right now.

Personally, I’ve always been fascinated by the minimalist way the Japanese live.  I’m not sure they have any drawers at all, much less one dedicated to junk.  How does a person live like that?  I’ve never even been able to keep my computer cables from being an unsightly mass under my desk.  Whenever I see a picture of a sleek, stark living space, I like to imagine that there is a secret panel in one of the walls behind which is a garage-sized room that is absolutely jammed with all the odd-sized and unattractive yet necessary bits of life.  (If you’re my age or older, the name Fibber McGee may come to mind.)

In college, I shared a basement apartment that had a magic closet.  I didn’t fully realize at the time how lucky my roommates and I were.  We kept putting things in it and it kept taking them.  Suitcases, bar stools, plants – I think we even got a sofa in there.  We never knew if the closet ate the stuff, vaporized it or pushed it through the earth’s core to China.  And we didn’t care.  It was fantastic!

That closet would be the answer to all of my problems now if I knew I wouldn’t need any of my junk again.  Aye, there’s the rub.  What to send to China and what to keep?  Who knows the answer to the question?  Not I.  And so I keep piling and clearing, wondering where I should put the three microscopic replacement screws that came with my new hair trimmers.