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ShelvedSeptember 16, 2009 I don't subscribe to many magazines, and I'm not self-deluded enough to keep infinite back issues in the belief that I'll get to them "one of these days," but the avalanche on top of Travvy's crate did include almost three years' worth of Poets & Writers (a bimonthly), two years' worth of Ms. (quarterly), a few off our backs and scattered issues of the Pennsylvania Gazette, which the University of Pennsylvania sends me bimonthly because I'm an alumna. I decided to hold on to all but the old Gazettes at least long enough to see if they pleased me enough to justify the space they occupied. First, however, I had to find some space for them to occupy that wasn't on top of Travvy's crate. The obvious choice was the shelves at the head of my bed. The drawback was that these hadn't been straightened up in quite a while -- not as long as the kitchen floor had gone unswabbed but still long enough for the less-read books and the less-used shelves to have accumulated a certain telltale fuzziness. This turned out to be a two-morning job. My studio apartment is divided into two parts, one a little bigger than the other. The smaller "half" includes the kitchen and has a pebbly linoleum floor. The bedroom/office half is wall-to-wall carpeted in utilitarian blue-gray. Straddling half the dividing line between the two is a built-in set of shelves about six feet high. An assortment of tchotchkes occupy the top shelf -- a blue-eyed Siberian husky stuffed toy, a rearing wooden horse, a small Jordanian flag, two ceramic goblets, a brown Wedgwood pitcher my grandmother gave me, and so on. It gets pretty fuzzy up there because I can't see the top of it unless I stand on my bed, so that's where I started yesterday. The next two shelves are accessible from both kitchen -- they're right over the sink -- and bed. On one side they're lined with kitchen stuff: cookbooks; big jars of flour, white, whole wheat, and rye; quart-size Mason jars of white beans, black beans, garbanzos, lentils, walnuts, and other staples; half my oversize collection of mugs (the other half is in a cupboard), and some empty jars and infrequently used bowls. The bedroom side is mostly a photo gallery of my journey from feminist bookstore worker to born-again horsegirl, with a few useful items -- a reading light, and a box of green Kleenex that Travvy chewed the end off when he was in his insatiable chewing stage. The lower of these two shelves is exactly nose level for a large dog standing on my bed. I lost an old pair of glasses before I finally figured this out. My boombox remote and my kazoo survived but are scarred with teeth marks. I finished those two shelves yesterday. This morning I did the lower, bedside bookshelves. This involves some maneuvering because the bed is a snug fit with no room to walk around it, and besides the ceiling follows the pitch of the roof. So I'd lie on the bed with my trusty vacuum at my side and pre-dust, dust, and rearrange the books, some of which, of course, I'd either thought I'd lost or forgotten I owned. The magazines that formerly sat on Travvy's crate are now stacked neatly on the shelves. All the books are standing upright. I can actually see the little alarm clock if I look over my right shoulder. Over my left shoulder yesterday was a paper slide creeping out from behind my deskside chair. It's gone. True, there's a swirl of newspapers, folders, photographs, receipts, and miscellaneous papers on my bed waiting to be clipped, sorted, and/or filed, and at least one of the piles on top of Travvy's crate is not (not, not, not!) going to stay there. Progress, however, has most certainly been made. I'm no one's idea of a clean freak, but now I'm eyeing the other neglected corners of my apartment. Morgana's keyboard, for instance. If a keyboard this grungy belonged to anyone else, I would hesitate to type on it for fear of getting cooties. Most of us are born inoculated against our own grunge, or we develop immunity PDQ as soon as we start having to clean up after ourselves. We know where our own grunge came from and believe that most of it is harmless. Most of us are not willing to extend the same tolerance to other people's. Enough, however, is enough. "Moderation in all things" certainly includes cleaning. Some people make a respectable living cleaning houses, but just about no one gets paid to clean her own apartment. Rather than take on my computer desk, I am about to resume cleaning up the manuscript I'm working on. I get paid for that.
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