Weekend Update (Friday Edition): Clearance
There are people who would never have accumulated the stuff that has piled up in our apartment over the years. I envy them.
It’s not that there wouldn’t be fifty times as much stuff if it weren’t for regular culls. But culling has never meant keeping the increase to zero. Until now.
Guess what I found! The name of the woman who painted the picture hanging over the sofa in the living room. It’s a vivid impression of the American Hotel in Amsterdam that we bought when we were there in 2002. The artist’s name is printed in a clear hand on a piece of the hotel’s notepaper. It was given to us by a clerk when we put down a deposit for the picture, which was on exhibit in the lobby. (Long story.) The painting took almost two years to cross the Atlantic, and it arrived with a small tear in the canvas. I will eventually copy the information into my Filofax, and throw the notepaper away.
Now I know why opera was invented: to buoy the soul through Sargassoes of such detritus. For example: many years ago — many, many years ago — we threw a surprise birthday party for Fossil Darling. The invitations were printed in the style of the partnership announcements that law firms used to send out. Very staid and simple, black sans-serif type embossed on ecru card stock. I still have ten of them. It’s easy for you to say: keep one and pitch nine. Eventually I will. Maybe I’ll give one to Fossil. It was a surprise party, you see, so he never got one. Â
Just one item in a very long list.
Did I mention clippings from The New York Times? I haven’t had the heart to see what, if anything, remains of the little data base that I built up during the TimesSelect days. Just as you can share an article at Facebook now, say, you could save an article in your own personal folder if you subscribed to the Times. During that time, though, I did not cut out and save any actual clippings, so I don’t know why I bring it up. Oh, I know: you never know, do you? That’s why I have tons of clippings from earlier years.
Here’s my plan: while “watching” a familiar Hitchcock classic, I’ll pull up URLs for the fraction of clippings that retain an iota of relevance copy them onto a FrontPage document (when is someone going to replace FrontPage?). Just to be safe, I’ll print the document when I’m through. The clippings will be tossed.
You can’t still be reading this.  But if you are, I expect that you, too, are waiting for miraculous wisdom to dawn in your brain, wisdom that will steer you safely between the Charybdis of procrastination and the Scylla of violent dumping. But wisdom is never miraculous. Slow but steady is the only way.