Clearing out the deadwood

Maybe it’s because it’s Christmastime and there’s more stuff coming into the house, but Patti Jo is on a -- well, I won’t say “rampage.” She’s on patrol, getting rid of things.

And she’s right; it has to be done. Like many Lagunans, we don’t have much room. Many of the older houses in town are small, especially by today’s standards, when well-to-do people are building stadia for themselves.

Our house is about 1,700 square feet, which in a contemporary mansion would be, perhaps, the pantry, and we’ve been in it now for almost 10 years, so it’s gotten somewhat cluttered. Over time you acquire things, and they establish their own territory.

Now, my wife is a monument to sanity, as she would have to be, but when our clutter reaches a certain level she is overtaken by a kind of fever. A nightmare vision appears before her of a future in which she and I are found buried under a mountain of old tree stands, scratching posts, Health Riders, glue guns, electric keyboards and the “Sledge Hammer” DVD collection.

So, as she always does when under this influence, she has rented a dumpster, and everything in the house is now endangered.

This fever of Patti Jo’s is common among parents, as many a kid has found out. My entire male generation would recognize her attitude as identical to the one which caused the infamous Baseball Card Massacre across the country in the late ‘60s.

Her initial toss-outs are always reasonable. This time she began in the garage and eighty-sixed some old drawers and shelving and a bulk order of red licorice originally intended for opening night at the Sawdust Festival but now a tangled mass of goo. All good, sound, easy decisions.

But this kind of activity acquires its own momentum, and once the obvious rubbish is exhausted, Patti Jo finds herself scanning the main living quarters, breathing deeply, eyes alight, on the lookout for the Next Big Thing she can get rid of -- anything that doesn’t work as well as it used to, any eyesore, anything that’s falling apart.

I try to stay as inconspicuous as possible.

In hopes of saving myself, I’ve sacrificed a lot of my own stuff lately, donating books to the Friends of Library and selling them on the Internet. I gave a jacket to somebody who came to the door, and I threw out a pair of shoes that had a few miles left in them.

In a little while the clutter should be reduced to a livable level, and we’ll settle down again. Patti Jo knows that in the normal course of events parents throw out the children’s toys and eventually the children as well, but she doesn’t want to do it prematurely.

It’s just that while the fever is at its height I have to make myself useful around the house. It’s crowded in here, but it would be a lot more crowded in that dumpster.20051209hrimoxkf(LA)