On Friday the library was closed for the holiday so the writer’s group met at an alternative location, the local theatre. The building, a former elementary school, sits next to the Grange at the crossroad of two rural country roads. The place was only an eight-minute drive from home, so it wasn’t really the middle of nowhere but it was definitely out in what you would call the country. A weird kind of country, though. Multitudes of brown cows, goats, and horses grazed in green and brown pastures presided over by modern McMansions. Big farms, big houses, big pickup trucks. Big country on the outskirts of a small town.
The production manager (who happens to be the boss of the writer’s group) took me on a tour. She is the writer who reads science fiction to us at the writer’s meetings and an important figure in town, I have discovered, involved with several city organizations. Writing is just one of her many pasttimes.
The theatre is a flat square building with several rooms all roughly the same size arranged in a circle, one of which was the actual theatre. The theatre (a former gymnasium) holds maybe seventy-five audience members? I’m guessing, I didn’t count the Tuscan orange carpeted seats, which I was told were salvaged from a nearby community college back in the ’90s. I’m sure the room looked perfect in the dark. It’s most interesting feature, for me, was a shiny white coffin parked in an aisle, partly hidden under a black tarp.
The other rooms were crammed floor to ceiling with cupboards and shelves loaded with objects required to produce theatrical productions: costumes, furniture, lights, sets, too much stuff to identify or describe. I still sneeze thinking about it.
The amount of clutter made me thankful for my quasi-minimalist lifestyle. I wanted to exit the theatre asap but I made all the praise sounds because I want to support creativity whenever and wherever I find it. Even if it comes in the form of a hundred dusty hats.
I’m not sure my lifestyle actually qualifies as minimalist. I’m not a spartan. I think I have a lot of stuff. Let me ask you, how many hangers do you have? I have nine. I could use four more, but for now, nine seems like enough. I don’t have many clothes. I’ve collected underwear over the years, which I wear way past expiration, so I’m good on underwear, and I have a lot of socks (all the same so I don’t have to match them), which I keep in a plastic bin. I have seven long-sleeve T-shirts, which seemed like enough until I realized I’d tie-dyed six of them with bleach to hide the food stains. I can’t bear to retire them so I bought four more of the same brand (black, gray, yellow, and purple). I don’t want to wear them so they occupy four hangers. I want to postpone the moment when I have to tie-dye them.
I have three cold weather pants and four warm weather pants, all in various shades of black. All but one pair are men’s pajama pants, and most have bleach stains on the knees and lower legs from my time living in my car. Bleaching a pee jar isn’t an exact science. Stand back is my advice, in case you have to do that in the future.
After retrieving my household goods from storage, I now have four white porcelain bowls. Two are large, two are small. I have one white dinner plate, the kind you can throw across the room and still use for pancakes. I have two coffee cups (my favorite says Oregonize® your life), two plastic water bottles, two aluminum water bottles (one says Holy Water for Parched Sinners), two insulated travel mugs, and a clear IKEA mug with a handle, which I use for smoothies.
I try to minimize new purchases, but I admit to buying a blender. My friend gave me a microwave. I have a carpet sweeper now (a vacuum seemed like too much). I bought a desk lamp. I got a nightstand from Goodwill. I built a worktable from a door and some cheap shelves and cinder blocks. So, yes, I have more stuff now than I did when I arrived in Oregon. I cringe sometimes.
In my defense, I haven’t bought any books. I didn’t keep many from my previous life, and now that I’m housed, I realize I didn’t even need those. I’m holding onto them, though. I may reread them after I grow tired of binge-watching Chinese historical costume dramas.
Does that sound like a lot of stuff, or a little? I have more than enough, and after touring that theatre, I feel like I still have too much. I remember my apartment in Portland. Eighteen years of stuff, much of it books and paper. Was there anything there I really needed? I thought so at the time, which is why I moved a lot of it to Tucson in a U-Box.
In Tucson, I gradually jettisoned pieces until I could fit the barest essentials in my car. The amount of stuff in my storage unit dwindled a little each time I visited it. Rugs, shelves, household goods . . . but even then, I didn’t purge enough when I moved from Arizona to Oregon. My minivan was packed too full for me to sleep anywhere but the driver’s seat. Does that seem like too much stuff? Now I have storage (built-in wire shelves) and not enough stuff to fill them.
I kept some keepsakes, for example, my grandmother’s leather pencil holder, decorated on the side with a handpainted Order of the Eastern Star pentagram; a green ceramic container with my mother’s name engraved on the side (Marge), which I use to hold toothpicks; a half-dozen family photos and pieces of art, some mine and some by friends; the ashes of my two cats; a cardigan jacket that was my mother’s (a weird maroon color I don’t like all that much); a Swingline stapler.
Multiple purges have still left me with stuff that someone else will have to deal with when I’m gone. Is that a nice thing to do to family, friends, or strangers?