CLUTTER!

I was afraid I’d find out I golf as poorly with my new clubs as I did with my old ones, that it isn’t my awful old clubs, it’s me. Reality: My game is improved. I’m still not good at it, but I hit farther, and straighter, with my new clubs. It’s also nice to have a new bag with bright, shining clubs that all match in it. I especially like my driver. The head of it is almost as big as my face, but the club is very lightweight. I’m going to have to go to a driving range and try out each club to see how each performs differently. I have three hybrids that take the place of some irons, but the numbers on them are different, seventeen, twenty-two and twenty-five. I’ll take notes so I don’t forget.

I called AmTrak on Monday and connected with a wonderful agent who was not in the least intimidated or irritated with the route a friend and I want to take next year from Saint Paul to Seattle to Sacramento to Salt Lake City, with stops along the way to do book signings. She figured out the fare both with a rail pass and "point to point" – every place we want to get off calls for a separate ticket when we get back on for the next stop – and it’s hundreds of dollars cheaper point to point. That surprised me. But we’re booked, so I guess it’s really going to happen. Look for us in your town, if you’re on our route, in June of 2010. Scheduled stops are: Fargo, Wolf Point, Cut Bank, East Glacier Park, Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, Reno, and Salt Lake City. Whew!

We moved into our current residence in June of 2007, from a four-level townhouse to an apartment. I moved from an office made from a nice-size bedroom to a windowless den more than a third smaller in size. So it wasn’t just because I didn’t want to move everything stored in my office to our new place, I couldn’t bring it along. Once I realized that, it was amazing what I decided I could do without. It’s also amazingly liberating to throw things away; it’s like putting down a heavy load you’ve been carrying for a long while. You add to it a little bit at a time so you don’t notice how huge it’s gotten. Then you start to clear things out, toss this and that and it’s almost like an avalanche. "If I don’t have to keep this, how can I possibly think I need to keep that?" Whoo-hoo!

What's interesting is that, two years later, I don't hear myself saying, "I wish I hadn't thrown that out" about anything!

I do wish I were more the sort of person who is very organized. I’m married to that sort of person, and it’s the biggest thing I’m envious of. People visiting us for the first time have no problem telling which office belongs to whom. One has everything put away in neat folders properly labeled or stacked on shelves in an orderly fashion. The other has stacks of paper not filed (every so often I’ll get angry at myself and will catch up on my filing, but in less than a week, there’s another stack built up), shelves cluttered haphazardly, and bags of partly-finished projects (at least they’re in bags, not left out to collect dust) piled all over the place. I like to think my office looks friendly and lived in; my husband would go mad trying to work in such disorder.

Maybe that’s what it is. I can live in more disorder than some people; less than others. I have at least two friends who can live with more disorder than I can stand, and many friends who absolutely must have a lot more order than I need. It’s probably something like, "the time it takes to complete a given task expands to fill the time allotted to it." The clutter piles up to every person’s ability to stand it. I used to think that if I had more room, so there was a place to put everything, I’d be more orderly. But now I think I’m actually a little neater when the space I’m given is severely limited.

I also like the notion already expressed in these pages that every so often we should pretend we’re going to move and go through our collections with that in mind.