When True Simplicity is Gain'd

Right now, Daughter is in her room, attending an online history class. Consort is at the kitchen table, at a meeting on Skype. I’m hiding in the office thinking up a blog which looks very much like gazing at pictures of breaded-cats on the Internet. And here, next to me, is a rainbow Slinky. The rainbow Slinky is the embodiment of why no one is ever invited to my house.

After thirteen years in this house, we still don’t have dining-room chairs. We don’t have dining-room chairs because we got the table at an estate sale and needed to buy chairs, but in the times we can afford chairs we can’t agree on them and when we find the right chairs the cars develop neurasthenia and need some time in a sanatorium. We do, however, have a rainbow Slinky which was gifted to the child at some point in the past. She walks around the house, idly Slinking, leaving it wherever it stops being relevant. I point it out to her, she picks it up; sometimes it even goes back to her room for a while. But then a day or two pass and I step into the shower and lo, rainbow Slinky is wrapped around the conditioner. Anything which actually requires thought before purchasing doesn’t get purchased, but the house is filled with random objects which washed up on our shore and have now applied for citizenship.

Here’s another member of the family. Daughter had a science experiment, one involving a straw, a bottle-cap, a CD, and a balloon. I don’t remember what it proved scientifically, but it went up in the air and beetled around and has since proven that something which goes up in the air and beetles around is entertaining about every 94 days and cannot be thrown out. Once it comes out of the closet for beetling-time, it tends to stay out for at least three days, usually on the coffee table. You know what’s never on the coffee table? Coffee. You see that little green rectangle behind the experiment? That’s dental floss, left over from another experiment. Whenever a human in this house thinks a room doesn’t look quite festive enough, we race to the bathroom and get something minty to liven up the place.

Here’s a bookshelf. You can tell it’s a bookshelf because there are four remotes and some Wii-related objects in there. Also, Capturing the Friedmans, a documentary about molestation. We’re going to hope Daughter will never think she’s grabbing the Mario and Sonic Wii game and plays that instead.

Oh, the traditional drawer; Pictures Left Over from Daughter’s Nursery, Needlepoint Frames I’ve Been Given and Perfectly Usable Bits of Wrapping Paper. What, you say you don’t have such a drawer? But then where do you put your roll of pink and green ribbon, your seven marbles and the Christmas ornament you found behind the couch in mid-February?

See that pile? That pile, I’ve been told, means something. I may not throw the pile away, because Consort is just about to take care of it because it’s very important. The pile has remained unsorted for about a year, so a more cynical person might think something like “How important can that stuff be if you can ignore it for a year?” Luckily, I’m not cynical.


People talk about the desk-drawer which collects the random objects; I’m starting to suspect the house is trying to become one giant drawer. There’s nothing which says “Please cross the threshold and be embraced by our warmth” but I comfort (or delude) myself that there’s plenty which says “These people might be bouncing through their lives like a Superball right now, but you can’t say they aren’t interesting.”

Which is true. You also can’t say we don’t own sixteen Superballs, because the cats keep finding them, even after I swear I’ve thrown them all away. But we’re starting businesses, and writing books, getting educated and learning great quantities of things, and maybe the house is just an outer manifestation of the hectic and happy state of our minds right now. If dining-room chairs and dental floss only in the bathroom meant Consort and the kid might not be doing a crossword puzzle together right now, it wouldn’t be worth it.

In sum, no one’s coming over soon but we’ll meet you someplace clean, sane and quiet, and we’ll bring stories from our loud, chaotic lives and together will dream of a day when we manage to be both organized and creative.

The rainbow Slinky will make an excellent file-holder.