Cleaning

I've decided that if I'm truly going to start my own business, I need a proper office. That means really cleaning out my second bedroom and getting it properly organized. What a filthy mess! For the past three years it's served as sort of a computer, study, junk room.


And yet, it feels like everything in the room is important and I can't really part with it. I have a stack of paper that's at least a foot high, collected readings, drafts of papers and stories. I have to keep it all. I have theater books that I have not looked at since before the flood. I have stacks and stacks of Shakespeare books that I poured over in my fruitless pursuit of playing Hamlet. I can't get rid of them. It feels like I'm losing a part of myself.


When I was a kid there were three times between the ages of twelve and eighteen when I had no choice but to pack up as much as I could in two suitcases and say good-bye to everything else I owned. Then when I was twenty-three I had to pack up my father's house, selling virtually everything that wasn't nailed down. It used to be that if I had to, I could get rid of anything I owned and not look back. But today, as I sift through things I'm flooded with memories of where I was when this piece of paper, or that book came into my life. I have the music blaring trying to keep me motivated through the sweat; Etta James. There's a clarinet break.

When I was in the second grade, kids were introduced to musical instruments. I chose the clarinet. I took it home and made it screech. The next day I left it at school and the teacher told me that I obviously wasn't serious about learning to play and he took it away. I let him.

As I type this, I find myself wondering if that was my first test to fight for something and I wonder if I failed. Another thing these papers and books remind me of are all the things that I tried and gave up on. I quit acting, and I wonder if I'd stuck it out where I'd be now. But then again, I have some very talented friends who've never quit and still don't have two nickels to rub together.

There, on the bottom shelf are several books on bartending. I tended bar at blues club for six months. But when I had the opportunity to leave, I couldn't get out of there fast enough. Was that quitting, or was that practicality? Bartending is not a career that will carry you through to retirement.

And it's moments like these that can overwhelm me, and the best thing to do is to plot a general course, put your head down and one foot in front of the other until you reach a destination. So, I dust off the books and rearrange them on the shelf. I stack the papers and try to store them somewhere out of the way. I run the vacuum and go to make dinner.

It's the best I can do for the day. Can anyone really do any better?