Order in the Court

Why a folded tee shirt and the Dewey Decimal System make me happy

I’m almost embarrassed to tell you how much deep pleasure I get out of organizing my closets and drawers. The sight of tee shirts folded and filed, like little cloth books, makes me so happy I could cry. Life is chaotic. A tidy drawer is a tonic, as soothing as an SSRI. I can’t make the tumult of human existence neat and orderly but I can arrange my skirts in a logical fashion and find peace, for a moment.

I live in a mid-century modern house, which was built in 1946. (That’s it, in the photo above.) Evidently, people in 1946 did not buy a lot of clothes or dishes or luggage or umbrellas, because there is scant room for them in this house. Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely love my house, but if I could magically add five more large closets I would love it even more. I will never get over having read, years ago, that the house of Aaron Spelling (who got rich producing such TV classics as The Mod Squad and Charlie’s Angels) and his wife Candy had a gift-wrapping room. That is, a room that had no purpose other than storing Candy’s wrapping paper and ribbon. I assume it also had a big table, perhaps even with ruler markings on it, and an enormous paper cutter, for making the magic happen. I don’t dream about having a tennis court, or a media room, or the other additions that most people yearn for: I dream of having a gift-wrapping room and many, many closets: Room for stuff. As it is, my gift wrap is shoved in a drawer in our guest room, and something about the height and angle of the drawer guarantees that I slam my knee into the edge of it every time I open it. Anyway, the point is not my knee; it’s the fantasy of having space for the kind of random items like gift wrap that has no good place to be.

The bedroom closets in our house are shallow and stingy. We reconfigured the main bedroom and carved out a slightly larger closet for me, but it’s still small and always on the verge of exploding, like an overstuffed clown car. I constantly comb through my clothes and seize on any item that I’m not using, or have gotten tired of, or ones that I have loved so much that they are beginning to fall apart, and out they go. I have to be brutal because I just don’t have space. Even after I’ve culled the herd, things are packed tightly and hard to see, so I then have to organize so that I can keep track of what’s there and make use of it.

This probably sounds a bit savage, but I secretly enjoy it. I love knowing what I’ve got, and knowing how to find it; it makes me feel like I have some control over my domain. You can imagine that I find the Dewey Decimal System very attractive. I know I risk you diagnosing me as OCD if I show you my tee shirt drawer, but since I feel we are almost family I am willing to take the chance:

On a recent day when I should have been working on my book, I decided to whip my tee shirts into shape: they were in a twist, and I realized I had begun buying ones that duplicated shirts I already had because I couldn’t see that I had them. This would not do. I pulled all of them out and dropped them in a gigantic, cottony pile, and forced myself to examine each one. Quite a few did not survive this examination. I folded the survivors using these amazing little shirt folding boards that are no longer made, so I can’t give you a link to them—I’m still trying to find a substitute since I’m out of them now. They were genius, turning a flabby tee shirt into a tight, sturdy little item suitable for filing. Just look at that drawer! Pure poetry, in my humble opinion. Functionally, it has changed my life and serves now as a reminder to not buy any more gray tee shirts.

I used to think that my hankering for organizing items in limited spaces was a one-off quality, like being able to touch my nose with my tongue: Singular and meaningless in the larger scheme of my personality. Then I realized that this skill, or impulse, or turn of mind, is exactly what I do as a writer. I gather millions of bits and shiny things, like a magpie, and then I line them up in a way that aims to be harmonious and fluent: Readable. I have to toss out the things that don’t fit and find a pattern for those that do. As it happens, I most enjoy writing about what other people do to organize their experience of being alive—the way they make sense of the curious churn of daily life, how they find a pattern that gives meaning to their existence. Sometimes, for me, that means filing tee shirts and other times it means writing a book, but the sense of satisfaction is the same, the contentment equal.

SHOW NOTES

—This is perhaps a controversial position, but I am now ready to declare that packing cubes are bullshit. I expect the full wrath of the travel-packing community to come for me, but I don’t care. I used packing cubes on this recent trip and wanted to believe in them, but all they did was turn my clothes into bricks that actually didn’t fit easily in my suitcase. Also, I am no physicist, but it seems to me that an item that takes up X amount of space will always take up X amount of space, and no amount of squishing can change that fundamental law of matter. Isn’t that what the theory of relativity established? Moreover, using packing cubes means all the little nooks in your suitcase remain empty, since your stupid packing cubes can’t be squeezed into odd little spots, which is what packing is really all about. I say this as someone who packs socks into my shoes, and so forth. Anyway, we have been sold a lie. I will never use them again.

—I just ordered this very large-pocketed skirt

—I’m listening to Jayne Anne Phillips’ Night Watch

—I’m watching Fallout with my son (he was a big fan of the video game).

—I’m listening (always) to First Aid Kit