On the 100th Anniversary of My Mother's Birth, I Take on the 100 Thing Challenge. In My Junk Drawer.

Before

After

Here's my December column for East Village Magazine, examining the archeological dig that is my junk drawer:

A few years back a guy named Dave Bruno had had it with consumerism and decided to reduce his personal possessions to 100 things. He blogged about it and started a worldwide movement, The 100 Thing Challenge.

This month, just in time for the ceaseless barrages of the holidays, he’s publishing a book, The 100 Thing Challenge: How I Got Rid of Almost Everything, Remade My Life, and Regained My Soul. I bet it will sell more than 100 copies.

I don’t trust people who make spirituality out of everything. I don’t trust “cleanliness is next to godliness,” for example; nature presumably made by God is frequently elegant but also messy—not to mention, bloody. And I don’t like hints that because I might be a little challenged, stuff-wise, I might be in mortal peril.

However, I was raised by a queen of clean, a housfrau of frugality, and this month would have been her 100^th birthday. My mom would have loved the idea of the 100 Thing Challenge. So it seems that the stars are suggestively and neatly aligned for me to make a gesture of propitiation.

When I first heard something about Bruno’s new book on NPR, I muttered to my cats, “Hell, I’ve got more than 100 things in one damn drawer.” The cats stared back sadly.

I meant my junk drawer.

Doesn’t everybody have one? A drawer, usually in the kitchen, where we stash our tawdry little bits of anxious life? A cache of personal anthropology – mirror to our worries, the vault for small stuff, unsellable on EBay, that we “might use” someday? The junk drawer blends the impulse to hoard and that persistent need for security. And, as another Dave, the “happiness researcher” Dave Buettner has been pointing out, “evolutionarily speaking, we are hardwired more for security than freedom.” Yikes. Maybe the junk drawer is a grown-up’s safety valve.

Unlike my mom, I am not obsessed with order. But the idea of exploring my junk drawer had a certain appeal, like going on an archeological dig. The day after Thanksgiving, still high on tryptophan and pumpkin pie, I pulled it off its squealing tracks, and heaved it, making sure to bend my knees, onto the living room floor.

Sitting crosslegged on the carpet, I eventually pulled out and listed 140 things on a legal pad.

At first, it all made sense, a logical collection of utility: stapler, scissors, cat brush, three Scotch tape dispensers, two lint rollers, three soft cloths for cleaning glasses, along with the glass cleaner to do it, 17 “forever” stamps, two Listerine pocket paks, two single-use tubes of Krazy Glue, a tube of lock de-icer – never used, a gift from my traumatized hubby after we once got stranded at midnight after a party on Calumet.

And then, all the stuff obviously there because it MIGHT be useful. Who in their right mind, really, would not understand the reason for 200 rubber bands from Flint Journals and bunches of asparagus? Who would question the need for 37 paper clips, 11 black document clips – great for bags of cereal or potato chips – 9 thumbtacks, a single push pin, a half-dozen twist ties, 15 AAA batteries, 5 AA batteries, 4 C batteries, and an extra nine-volt? There’s even 47 cents in change, in case. Just in case.

But the next layer, from the neglected, dusty back, creeped me out, yielding a succession of items of mysterious origin and way past their time.

What’s this? A fold-up hiking compass! Cool, but I haven’t been on an actual hike, in the woods, for about 20 years. Two plastic canisters with undeveloped rolls of film – anachronism – I’ve had a digital camera for years. Anyway, did I really want to see what might be revealed, what aggravating family gathering, what possibly compromising party? Ah, I remember this little battery-operated hand-held fan with a Las Vegas logo – cherished gift from a compassionate friend when I was still having hot flashes – now long unused, its batteries dead.

Then, tectonic plates of heartbreak and abandoned hope: the brass nametag for my late cat Joey One, dead for five years, his ashes buried in the back yard; a “Women for Kerry/Edwards” campaign button: Rosie the Riveter, with her plucky “We can do it” logo. And a pillbox of folded-up notes I’d written to my parents – saved from their stuff after they died a dozen years ago – notes neither imaginative nor redeeming. “Dear Mom…thank you for all you’ve done for us. We love you.” “It was sure good to be here. P.S. I had a snack before I left.” Why on earth are these still here?

Finally, just a pile of random and marginally disgusting stuff: two clothespins, one red plastic, one wood; a chipped ceramic pentacle tile; a plastic attachment for a long-gone vacuum cleaner; a six-ounce bottle of green automotive touch-up paint; a dry erase marker; two heavy duty locks; a pack of grape Pez; a Ya-Ya’s moist towelette, two packs each of pepper and salt; a half roll of chewable papaya enzymes; eight tiny plastic bags of replacement buttons; a broken birthday candle; two triangular pieces of dry cat food. Easy calls, all – to the trash.

The drawer empty, finally I stood up and took a deep breath. The cats, unimpressed, sniffed around my desultory piles.

So, since I am at least a part-time academic, I retreat now from my dig to profess what this all means.

In summary, I don’t know.

There’s actually a discipline devoted to “things” these days, called, remarkably, “Thing Theory.” An English professor named Bill Brown wrote a book about it. And we poets know how William Carlos Williams declared, “no ideas but in things.” But what ideas in which things?

What I mined from my junk drawer was only this: there are things we accumulate, for whatever reason – out of torpor, hope, sentimentality, or practicality – that give us comfort. Or maybe that’s just me – me and my curious and incorrigibly disheveled existence.

Here’s what I can say for the condition of my soul, my act of contrition in honor of my mother: pared and purged down to about 70 things, the drawer slipped back onto its metal track a bit more lightly.

Would that my restless mind, busy accumulating the next drawerful of comforting trinkets, went along.

Mother and the Farmers' Market

Here's my March East Village Magazine column. Whenever I'm going through periods where wrestling toward happiness becomes an issue, she comes to mind. Of course. It's all so primal.

Flint Farmers Market at harvest season, September, 2009

In the last few years of her life my mother ate almost nothing. She had had colon cancer and for a tortuous few months bore a colostomy bag. Then they unhooked it and reconnected her digestive tubes and she lived another couple of years. But food was a problem the rest of her life, and eating deteriorated into a thorny, bedeviling process, a lifelong pleasure lost .

But not before she left her mark on me. This is an essay about food. That is why it begins with Mom. Born exactly a hundred years ago this year, she grew up in a family that assumed itself upper middle-class -- white, Protestant -- morosely inhabiting a big, drafty Victorian house in Findlay, Ohio.

Their status wobbled in the difficult Twenties. My traveling evangelist grandpa, by some accounts a brilliant but erratic man, usually spent most of the take from his intineracy before he made it home to the Painted Lady on North Corey Street.

My grandmother took in roomers and fed her five kids Sunday night -- my mother remembered with a mix of melancholy and wounded nostalgia -- suppers of stale bread softened in warm milk, green onions poked in like swizzle sticks.

From then on, my mother cared deeply about making sure there was enough nutritious food on any table over which she presided. In college, she majored in that quaint, painfully proto-feminist curriculum, Home Economics. She could talk, not that anybody usually wanted to listen, about the chemistries of canning and rising bread dough.

In the Tara-like nursing home where she lived her last four years, she clung to some of her cherished food rituals. She held court at the head of the table in the dining room when we came to visit, folding and unfolding her cloth napkin and taking in tiny spoonfuls of creamed spinach, or pureed sweet potatoes, maybe a microgram of butterscotch pudding.

As always, she admonished her children, children’s children and various hangers-on to eat slowly, use our silverware properly, orchestrate reasonably small bites and chew discreetly with our mouths shut, one hand in the lap.

More important, even, we were supposed to converse. We were supposed to smile and be grateful, attentive to the sensory gifts of the table, and we were supposed to report on our lives and say interesting things. Nobody was excused before it was over. That concept -- children being cut loose for other, more entertaining activities -- struck her as uncalled for and indulgent. Everybody was required to stick it out for the whole shebang. That was The Way People Behaved.

She was a passionate gardener and food aesthete, often declaring upon hailing her guests to table with a little Chinese bell, that the meal was based on “good concomitants,” and pointing out her often ingenious selections of color and taste: sweet corn with Kentucky Wonder beans and pickled beets, eggplant with the carnelian tomatoes, the gooseberry with the rhubarb.

These days I think, what a waste, that her talents weren’t more noted and praised. She was an intelligent woman who never found an audience quite worthy of her devotions.

Yet I am healthier today, as my own old age sets in, because of my first 18 years, those daily “three squares,” of wonderful food she conscientiously and even joyfully provided.

And that leads me, all these decades later, to a sweet little miracle of downtown Flint, the Farmers Market.

This is what I'm talkin' about

Entering my sixties, it is more important than ever to me to find the corners of the world where I can be happy, where I can pursue the sanguine concept my mother never called “wellness,” where I can find both audience and stage for the goodness of life and share it with others.

And there is Dick Ramsdell, the market manager, up on a ladder in the middle of the big aisle, counting patrons. And there’s the Hills kid at the cheese counter, helping me decide between the English and French cheddar. He offers me an aromatic slice of the latest Stilton on a square of parchment and announces my favorite butter, wrapped in blue and white checked paper and tucked in a miniature straw basket, is in from Vermont.

And there are piles of glowing gold butternut squash and red potatoes, tangerines and pears, feasts of carrots, cauliflower and cabbage gathered by the Penziens and Coykendalls. And the fresh-cut chicken, whole roasters and Rubenesque ducks at Ron and Linda Howard’s stall.

At the bakery, Nancy & Costa Anagostopoulos bustle around behind glass-covered pastry cases. My nose flares at the fragrant yeastiness, and my husband buys his favorite lemon croissants.

At D’Vine Wines, I stock up on Leese-Fitch Cabernet and Protocolo, greeting Karen and Maria, and my husband picks up fresh milk in glass bottles. On the way back down the aisle, we buy hummus and tabbouli from David and Ani Jawhari, say hello to Todd the book guy, buy some Patty Warner cards, and pick up another pair of colorful hand-made socks from Soozie Q’s.

We culminate our Farmers Market visit by climbing the stairs to Steady Eddy’s, where Ted devours the BLT and I have the South of the Border omelet, mild.

I’m longtime buddies of Kim, Lisa and Chris, who serve me espresso in my favorite blue cup, and I am extravagantly smitten that “Daddy,” Lisa’s late father Mike Lord, overlooks the café’s goings on from a squat urn on a shelf behind the take-out counter.

My mother would approve of the Flint Farmers Market, where we take our time, selecting “good concomitants” for our week and chatting amiably at our Steady Eddy’s meals.

Like the spirit of the irrepressible Lord, a friend whose life I celebrate with every sip of thick espresso, my mother’s plucky ghost goes with me when I act in my own behalf, like when I linger contentedly over the good life of the Farmers Market.

“It’s about time to get happy,” I imagine her – or my dream mother -- saying. “Life is fleeting – savor it all.”

Progressive (Not Liberal) Lenses

Ah, the joy of optical insurance, which allows me new glasses each year. I have astigmatism, myopia, presbyopia and a few other opias I can't think of at the moment. Every year my eyes rudely show my pitifully advancing old age, squinting inexorably up the eye chart to a line they can actually make out. I think I'm up to the inch-high letters. Do they get any bigger?

So this year, in the flush of my ophthamological modifications, I decided to buy my first pair of "reading" glasses, though for me they are for the most part "computer" glasses (websites call them PC glasses) since that is when I need them most.

With all my opias, combined with my boundless vanity, I've insisted every year on getting "progressive lenses" so as not to look like my mom in glasses. Hers had those big lines across the middle and caused her (as I thought of it then) aged and vaguely embarrassing habit of raising her chin when she had to look at something up close -- like my own face, which she examined with unnerving curiosity, scanning for evidence of failure and dissolute living. (As an optical scan, my mother's gaze was like a laser, leaving little scratches like paper cuts on my emotions. She saw things there I could hide from everybody else. It was infuriating. The powerful bifocals of her later years exaggerated the torment).

Whoa! I didn't know this was going to be about my mother! Damn. I thought I was going to make a few cute comparisons between "progressive lenses" and the current political scene, in which people suddenly are using the "P" word, as in my stylish glasses, much more than the "L" word. I must say the moniker "liberal lenses," while certainly appealing as alliteration, doesn't have the same across-the-board appeal.

Here's the thing: on progressive lenses, especially for those of us who require trifocals, the "sweet spots" for each kind of vision, as my nice eye doctor puts it, are by necessity of design quite small, and require considerable training of the brain. It takes fine discrimination and practice to see the world through progressive lenses. Sometimes, though, my eyes tire of the effort and I just want to see things one way -- up close -- the distant view consigned to fuzzy indistinction. It's arduous to keep track of the near and far view simultaneously. See? There IS a metaphor here. Focus, I tell myself, focus!

In conclusion, look! Everybody wants to be progressive, right? Isn't that All-American, as All-American as flag lapel pins and putting your hand over your heart during the pledge? (The HEART, Barack -- not the upper colon -- you gotta pay attention when you're running for office in a cliche-ridden society!) And everybody wants to think that he or she can see equally well up close and at a distance -- it's all in how you tilt your head, right? Left?

I think even my mother would agree. As long as I'm eating enough (locally grown) roughage, that is, and taking a daily constitutional. Now there's something progressive to get exercised about.

Lord Jim, a Mother Lode and my Mother Tongue

It's amazing how one thing leads to another. A couple of weeks ago, from a box in a closet, looking for something else, I retrieved my high school paperback copy of Lord Jim and started rereading it. The reason this particular book drew me in now is a topic for another time. But something startled me as I thumbed through it. In the margins and on top of many pages, I'd scrawled words I was learning as I read.

In my still-childish hand, on the browning pages are: prescience, torpid, furtive, truculent,alacrity, lugubrious. All words I have loved my whole life. Is it possible Conrad's lushly styled prose is the lode from which I originally mined these words for my vocabulary? The habit of words, the hunger for them, springs from a deep well.

When I left my first husband and moved to Sylvester Manor, a granite pile in downtown Flint filled with a lot of other weepy and disappointed women, one of the first things I did was put a list of my favorite words on the door of the fridge. Along with unearthing Lord Jim, I just found it, tucked in a journal from that time: aileron, catalyst, springerle, baleen, ephemeral, mango, jettison, meander, suffused, inexorably, vituperative, sobriquet. These words comforted me because I loved them -- loved knowing them, loved the way it felt to say them, the way my mouth moved around them, loved their precise complexities. They offered order and continuity when all else was chaos.

And while looking for that list, I came across a third artifact -- a little brown leather ring binder notebook of my mother's, in which she kept lists of words. Like Lord Jim, this was another lode -- a Mother Lode of deeply emotional significance.

It's roughly in alphabetical order, with definitions. I see some of my words are also hers: "catalyst" and "ephemeral" jump out. For some reason, the "e" and "p" pages have been lifted out, so the first thing I see when I open the little book is this: "escargot - snails" and "epicurean - refers to Gr. philosopher who was fond of luxury & sensuous pleasures." Each word and definition adorns the lines in her neatly curved handwriting, as distinct to me as her voice but easier now to enjoy, preserved in many old letters and her prolific notes to herself.

It interests me that it is not so much the words in sentences; my mother collected individual words -- protean, pizzazz, platitude. On the page, they are like bouquets where no two flowers are the same, a cornucopia of words in which each one registers on the mind like an individual gourd, bright and textured -- catatonic, cowl, curmudgeon.

My mother kept her cache secret. I never saw this little notebook until after she died. It was in a drawer in her desk. She didn't write where she found the words or why she liked them, just list after list, in her own hand, crisp and quaint: "dichotomy -- a division into two subordinate parts -- hence a cutting in two," "debacle -- an overthrow, rout or sudden disaster," "drivel - foolish talk."

I think she kept these words simply for herself, for her own pleasure, or like me, for reassurance, like a stash of kruggerands in a vault. Or like dozens of idiosyncratic buttons in a tin, which I also found among her effects. I knew that she loved words -- she used them playfully in conversation, insisting that we pay attention. But I wish we'd talked about all these individual choices; I would have asked her why she liked them. There's also sadness in it -- that she saved these words in solitude, for what? for when? Did she whisper them to herself in a dark night? Did she leaf through the pages for tonic when she was down? Did she review them as she aged to remind herself that, in fact, she had used her sharply observant and cataloguing brain?

Here's the way Lord Jim and my mother juxtapose. As I riffled through the novel, I realized with a start that not all the words at the top were in my hand. Some, I see, are in hers. She must have picked up the book after I left and pulled out her own: rancor, moribund, fecund. We pursued our lexicons out of the same book, but at different times. What was she thinking when she picked up my habit? Why this book? What did she think about Marlowe's story and the fate of the poor Muslim pilgrims aboard the Patna? Of course I'll never know. What I do know, though, is that her hunger for words continued long after her children left home, driving her into the small and tattered libraries we left behind.

Robert Pinsky is fond of saying that the art closest to poetry is dance -- the body is so intimately involved in both -- poems literally come from the poet's breath. Touching my mother's notebook, holding it in my hand, I realize my poetry began even earlier -- from the person who gave me breath. My mother conveyed to me a visceral love of the way words work in the body, in the mind, and in the heart. They come from hunger, sometimes a secret hunger. And they live after we die. So this is to celebrate Joseph Conrad and Carol Worth, beloved progenitors of my mother tongue.