I’m dreaming of a neat office ~ March 11, 1999

David Heiller

My office at home tends to be a catch-all for things that are in transition. It has piled up with a lot of stuff lately.

Our short-lived rocker. The cardboard
 electric was quite good enough.

I don’t want to call it junk, because it’s not junk, yet. It’s still at the stuff stage.

There’s the electric guitar that I got my son for Christmas two years ago. It was a gamble, and I lost. He has played it twice, maybe. But until he feels the urge to take after Jonny Lang, or until I feel the urge to take after him, it has found a home in my office.

Or the box of Dickens Village boxes that we inherited from Cindy’s mom, Lorely. You know your office is cluttered when it contains a box of boxes. The village has found a temporary home in our living room on the piano. We left it up after Christmas in honor of Lorely. The village contains a house with a light that goes off and on by its own accord. We think that Lorely is living in it, and sometimes she stays home and sometimes she goes out, which is certainly her right.

The box of boxes for the Dickens Village pieces have to be saved for when—or should I say IF—we ever take the Dickens Village down. So it sits in my office.

A small portion of my mother's 
Dickens Village. Putting it up was a ritual to
remember her for a number of years.

There’s the Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner, which comes in handy for sucking up the dead flies that drift down at all hours. And my guitar case, and old photos in frames, and old calendars, and an old computer, and a pail of crayons, and a folding chair, and a fire extinguisher that I should hang on the wall one of these days.

And there are—or were—the papers, the receipts and brochures, the old bills and bank statements, the piles of papers that started out on top of the filing cabinet and then spilled onto the floor.

I’m not a good filer. If something needs to be filed, it should be filed right away, but that never seems to happen. It starts as a small pile, but gradually builds into a volcano that spews in all directions.

Dr. Donna Cronin is like that. She says she has a PHD: Pile Higher Deeper.

I was at a friend’s house the other day, standing in his office, and it made me feel better to see that it was cluttered too. It looked a lot like my office, except instead of Twins pennants on the wall he had a poster of different kinds of lettuce.

David laying out the paper in Askov. So much stuff.
(not to be confused with junk)

He said it used to be his office, but it has become more of his wife’s office now. His words carried a wistful tone, and I could sense that he wasn’t real happy about the change, although I would be willing to bet some serious money—if I had any—that his old office didn’t look any neater than his shared space.

I might be wrong. But it’s one thing to have an office full of your own clutter, and quite another thing to have to put up with some else’s stuff. The same goes for the garage, or your bedroom dresser, or any territory that you claim as your own.

In his office in Caledonia.
 Malika said that this photo shows why he
is so smart: his brain is clearly plugged in.

I’m on a mission to clean up the office, and I’ve made some progress, thanks to a newly reorganized filing cabinet. All those papers I mentioned earlier have been filed or thrown away. So far I have tossed out two 50-pound bags that had been emptied of dog food and filled with papers.

I condensed some of the files too. For example, I had one file labeled brochures, and one labeled pamphlets, and one labeled warranties and they all held basically the same thing! Which was anything that looked like a brochure, warranty, or pamphlet.

Why did Ι need to save a brochure on canning vegetables? Or a pamphlet for a blender that broke five years ago? Or the owner’s manual οn bicycle that we bought for our 15-year-old son when he was four?

So I reduced three filing cabinet drawers of, papers to one drawer, which left two drawers free to hold some of the stuff on the floor. So now the office floor only has four boxes of stuff on it. And they will disappear soon! I’m going to find a different home for them. In the kids’ rooms.

Then my office will be neat and orderly, like my life, and the dog will bring me my pipe and slippers, and I’ll sit in my smoking jacket in the evening, reading William Butler Yeats while Cindy bakes bread and nurses the baby in rocking chair, a fire glowing in the hearth nearby.

And if you believe that, I’ve got some land to sell you in Birch Creek Township.