The Great Purge of 2004

No, nothing to do with having to eat lots and lots of fiber. Katrina decided that it's absolutely insane that even though there are only the two of us living in our house, we have every room and every cupboard and every closet full of stuff. Now, Gary Rodebaugh would've warned her four years ago when we were married (and I think he did) that she was marrying the man with, and I quote, "a million things!" (That was the way Gary always referred to my posessions - in the collective, with the assumed exclamation point on the end). I gained this moniker when I was packing up my life in Long Beach to move north to Vancouver during the late summer of 1995. He couldn't conceive of how one person would be able to fill up an entire U-Haul trailer with his worldly possessions. I, on the other hand, was proud of the fact that I gave away the two boomboxes I'd owned since 1983. (Actually, gave is too generous a word - "forced" would be much more appropriate, given that there was literally no more room in the U-Haul for them).

Anyway, you'd think that in the process of moving, things would get lost, broken, stolen, left behind, etc. That doesn't happen to me. Almost everything I no longer own that I did when I left California (or, better still, when I first moved out of my dad's house in Seal Beach), I have cast off of my own free will. In fact, the only three things I can think of that have actually been lost in moves over the past fifteen years are my parents' Bell and Howell movie projector, a pair of turquoise blue sweatpants, and the broiling tray from my mom's toaster oven. (I believe I also lost a couple cast-iron skillets to my first roommate in Vancouver - Brian moved out the day before I did, and all the skillets were gone. I got a couple back from him, but if they were the actual ones I brought with me, I'll never know).

Well. I've done a lot of casting off of things, if I do say so myself. Granted, I still own my original Commodore Vic-20 computer and Atari 2600 game console, but, hey -those are cultural icons we're talking about! And besides, they are safely tucked away in the one domain of my house that I can truly call my own - the garage. Katrina goes out there to get in her car and to drop things in the recycling bin, and that's about it.

About a month ago, she declared this weekend "Purge Weekend." After completely renovating the living room, she decided the rest of the house needed to be brought up to speed. And before that could happen, all the crap that's gathered up in four years of marriage had to be moved out of the way. Hence, the Great Purge of 2004.

It's not been as bad as I would have thought. We went through our videos and got rid of a bunch of tapes that we haven't watched in forever or have replaced on DVD. My CD collection, which currently stands at about 500 separate discs, has always run rather lean, oddly enough, so I only found two or three items to pull from there. The bookcases in the loft were a bit harder. I convinced her I needed to keep the copy of the Oeresteian Trilogy I (accidentally?) stole from Mrs. Durham's class in AP English, but not so for my Penguin Classics edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, from Dr. Bell's class on medieval literature at Long Beach State.

And so it went. My well-loved copy of To Kill a Mockingbird made the cut, six volumes of educational theory texts I had slog through for my MA program did not. Our bookcases are, well, not bare, to say the least (she even let me keep *both* my Narnia Chronicles sets), but they're a lot more open than they once were.

The truth of the matter is, it's rather freeing to have the stuff out of here. (It's not actually gone yet - there are stacks of books and whatnot in the garage, awaiting pricing for a garage sale at my mother-in-law's place). The great thing about purging your stuff is being able to take an honest inventory of what's there. Do I really need two massive Bible commentaries, taking up nearly a half-foot of shelf space combined? No. Pare down, give away, throw away, discard, unleash, unhook, untie. As Thoreau said, "simplify, simplify, simplify."

Of course, my copy of Walden got to stay.