YOUR Crazy Mother …

Voyage into the Infinite Filing Cabinet.

Of what possible use are one hundred agendas for a meeting held in 1974? Of what possible use is a day planner cataloging one’s comings and goings before the millennium? Of what possible use is a hermetically sealed statement for an insurance policy that lapsed during the Reagan administration? These are questions any pack rat would find absurd and Myrna is no exception. She gives me a puzzled, “are you speaking in a foreign language” look any time I suggest she toss these priceless (without price = worthless) artifacts of days gone by.

Myrna has worked from home for many years. She has a home office (of sorts). There is a desk, filing cabinets, a fax machine (that she doesn’t know how to use), a computer (that she barely knows how to use) and many other office-​​like accoutrements. She spends many hours each day in this office calling her contacts, following up on leads, filling orders and generally making her livelihood. This all sounds rather mundane as such things go. But, as is typical for anything done Myrna-​​style, the surface perception of normality thinly veneers an underbelly rife with oddities, these oddities occasionally erupting like an angry, too long dormant volcano spewing deadly, burning lava over the countryside.

About once every two months, she comes out of her room, with a determined, resolute look, pledging to the world (the cats and I really): “I’m going to muck out the office. I’ll have it done by [fill in a date several weeks away].” Her referring to the task as ‘mucking out’ is telling in and of itself, because a good portion of the time, the room does resemble some sort of animal pen. I then remind her that no one cares but her. I then remind her that she said the same exact thing about two months ago and that the office looks no different after her ‘muckings’ than it did before. This is a hot button for her, a button I just love to push. She then gets that “how dare you” look on her face and swears up and down that this time it will be different, “you’ll see!” she exclaims. I actually don’t give a damn what her office looks like but do care that she cares so much but seems completely powerless to actually do anything concrete about it.

This is Myrna’s desk. This is Myrna’s desk when it is REALLY, REALLY tidy.

On one of these declaration-​​of-​​war days, I offered to help her, thinking maybe she just needed an audience to shame her into filling the trashcans or maybe she just needed plain old help with the monumental task. Well… we then started down a long, landmine-​​riddled path. If I participated long enough in the cleansing of the office ritual, someone was going to die in a burst of emotional shrapnel and it was not at all clear which of us it would be.

So it began. Her desk seemed a natural place to start and if that’s where we finished that would be fine as it would impact her day-​​to-​​day workings the most. Her desk is perpetually covered, almost completely, with a vast and diverse crowd of minutia. There is a large vintage nineteen-​​seventies faux wood organizer, taking up about a third of the primary workspace. It has slots for folders, cups for pens, trays for paperclips. The penholder is filled to bursting with pens that, for the most part, do not work. The file slots are likewise running wild with bills from eight years ago, papers that need immediate attention, funeral service programs, junk mail, receipts for groceries, magazine articles about construction projects begun and finished when A Flock of Seagulls was all the rage — you get the idea I hope; all in no particular order. As you can see from the photo, there is no real workspace there. What little room is left for her, she has given to a towel for the cats to lie on — they find her office work quite fascinating and since they like to keep her company, they should be comfortable, we are not barbarians after all. The drawers are equally a minimalist’s nightmare. I do not know why she needs three thousand rubber bands, Rolodex cards for dead people or check registers from two decades ago; nor do I know why they need to be at the ready in her primary desk drawer. The project of thinning out the pens alone was a gargantuan, insurmountable set of decisions. Each pen had to be evaluated individually before being laid to rest. If there was a molecule of ink left, they were to be kept, but segregated from the more youthful population just in case all of the actually instrumental instruments failed at once — apparently a worry that keeps Myrna up at night.

I was fairly strict about the desk, but already my resolve to “git ‘er done” was waning from constant erosion by her nonsensical overvaluations of sundry office products. We ended the desktop project about six hours later, reclaiming a little more than a square foot of real estate for her. At that rate, it was going to take about 43,000 years to complete the whole room. We were pulling weeds by hand, with tweezers, when what we really needed was a squadron of Hueys dropping Agent Orange by the ton.

I then decided that we needed to tackle one of the two filing cabinets in the office, God help me. I had the idea that we could clear out one or two of the three drawers and Myrna could start a sensible, organized filing system for her current papers. It makes me laugh out loud how I naively rushed to pave that road to Hell.

It might look like any other filing cabinet, but I assure you, it violates the laws of physics by having more volume on the inside than it does on the outside.

In an infinite universe everything that can possibly happen does happen. Likewise, in an infinite filing cabinet every paper that can possibly exist does exist. Apparently, Myrna splurged when appointing her office and sprung for the infinite filing cabinets. Myrna extended this principle, naturally, by putting many, many other non-​​papery, non-​​file-​​like items in the cabinets, flirting with a catastrophic rupture in the space-​​time continuum. Let the non-​​comprehensive list commence:

• As stated in the header, 100+ meeting agendas from 1974,
• newspaper clippings detailing a bygone beauty pageant,
• yet another package of rubber bands,
• a file on a customer that died twenty years ago (not the same long dead customer who’s Rolodex card holds a place of esteem in her desk drawer, by the way),
• a series of labeled but empty files,
• utility bills from my apartment, fifteen years old (how or why she has them?),
• a detailed summary of service on a car she sold when I was in high school,
• half a ream of blank, pink paper,
• woefully anachronistic greeting cards for all occasions, some new, some used,
• a petrified cookie,
• a long list of Mormon aphorisms, hand written, not by my mother,
• a Polaroid photo of a tree I don’t recognize,
• an almost plausible set of customer invoices, but not her customers,
• notebook after notebook after notebook detailing her spending in 1987,
• some purple ribbon in a ziplock bag,
• fourteen copies of my grandfather’s obituary,
• a long set of shipping receipts from last year,
• the bills from her attorney for the divorce of my father long ago,
• a binder with 1996 through 1998’s IRA monthly statements, including the envelopes they came in, neatly sleeved in plastic,
• a binder filled with empty neat sleeves of plastic,
• a bundle of empty neat sleeves of plastic, in a neat sleeve of plastic,
• photocopies of ancient bank statements,
• one single, not-​​so-​​ancient original bank statement (with canceled checks), that she has been frantically looking for to close last year’s books,
• a pamphlet about what to do in case of a flood,

(I could go on for some time, infinitely really, but I’ll close with an irony,)

• a book about how to keep yourself organized.

With this in mind, you might ask, why don’t you just throw the whole damn thing away? Is it really worth it to go through everything item by item? Well, of course, a sane person would answer, no, it’s not worth it. (Insert sound of record needle being pulled off the record abruptly.) I did attempt such a thing. This was kind of like dropping an atomic bomb. The screaming began; the frantic grabbing at papers commenced as I headed them to their fitting end. She actually blocked the door to her office to keep me from disassembling this physical analog of her chaotic mind. I understand now, I was throwing her away, not a bunch of junk and Myrna can put up a hell of a fight when push comes to shove. It quickly became obvious that she was simply not going to allow the doing of what needed to be done. Her ‘mucking out’ of the office was a sham and my presence was a bitter reminder to her of that unpleasant fact. I was no longer welcome, and frankly, I had just about had it with her anyway.

The short of it is: the office remains in anarchic equilibrium. She takes out as much as she brings in. The deeper recesses never see the light of day, remaining intact as the surface fluff is exchanged every couple of months. I have simply changed my definition of what it means to clean and organize an office to accommodate Myrna’s inability to do the brave thing. She complains about the mess, which I remind her she has no right to do, but she secretly needs the mess. It is a cocoon of familiarity, an old, worn blanket she cannot bear to discard. I pity her, but then, I look about my own office-​​ette and realize I am casting stones from a glass house. I will let her live her little lie, because I too must do the same.