Confessions of a Pack Rat

A rare (but oh-so-temporary) feeling of being caught up led me to a radical move today— clean out my desk drawer. Here’s what it looked like when I emptied it atop my desk.

 

So off I went on my merry way diving into the chaos and sorting paper clips, pens and pencils, staples, stamps, address labels, scissors, rulers, three fingernail clippers, three pairs of glasses, some random pins, a medallion from the Ambassador of Singapore (??!!), rolls of coins (including pennies—will they be valuable some day?), little address books, pandemic masks, various chapsticks, various business cards I had collected over the years, obsolete electronic cords, my checkbook and yet more. Much of which I don’t regularly use anymore and some of which I might if I knew it was there—and now I do. 

 

I’m far from the worst-afflicted of people I know with the pack-ratitis disorder, but I confess that I save little things that come my way and when I don’t know where to store them, throw them randomly in a drawer. And then a year or two later, finally decide to sort out said drawer and actually get a little pleasure from seeing the business cards of people I had forgotten, my old driver’s license, the little metal box with paperclips that my SF School student Whitney gave to me for Christmas a lifetime ago, my old (now obsolete) Niji pens and such. Look through my old address book with addresses in pencil and take a moment to remember the people I haven’t kept in touch with or have left us for the other world. I wonder about the mysteries like the Singapore medallion (going there in January— maybe I’ll bring it and look up Jonathan Kaplan). I delight in seeing Dave Brubeck’s handwritten address, which he gave to me after a concert where I brought my 8^th grade kids and asked if I could send our recording to him.

But the biggest surprise was finding six gift cards— Barnes and Noble, Bi-Rite Market, two Amazon cards, one You Tube and most remarkable of all, an American Express Gift Card donated by SF School families worth $330 with a 2028 expiration date!! These abstract gifts obviously don’t work so well for me— better to give me a bottle of fancy olive oil or some chocolate bars. But let’s see if they work. With no presents under our tree, maybe I’ll be inspired to buy something— like fancy olive oil and chocolate bars. 

 

Meanwhile, tomorrow? The sweaters piled up on the shelf in my closet!