The Most Valuable Thing in My House

In a world filled with dazzling technologies, the things I value most—and always seem to be in short supply— are:

 

• Clothes hangers

• Clothespins

• Rubber bands

• Paper Clips.

• Post-its

• Pencils with erasers

 

Regarding the latter. The 20 pencils or so in our house all have erasers worn down to the nub. A few are the kind you can add to the pencil, but they hardly work and often break off. As an artist, my wife uses a rectangular stand-alone eraser that I tried today and it works great! But she only has one.

 

My now-daily habit of doing an Acrostic word puzzle (only available in books through the mail by Penny Press) is a legacy from my Dad. He did one or two a day and remarkably, always did them in pen! Me, I need pencil and more importantly, I need an eraser. So that’s my big project of the day as I go out into the world— to buy a good supply of erasers. 

 

It was the composer Arnold Schoenberg who was reputed to have said: 

“The most important tool for a composer is an eraser.”

 

The same could be said of a writer or teacher planning music classes or other creators. Goodness knows the alleged Almighty could have used one when creating human beings! 

 

And while I often complain that “advances” in technology are often anything but, I can state unequivocally that the delete button on the computer is far superior to white-out on the typewriter. And perhaps even a little bit better than an eraser, able to obliterate whole passages in a single highlight-and-click-delete stroke. 

 

As author Anne Lamott advises her writing students, by all means splash it all out there while the inner critic is sleeping and write shitty first drafts. And then— eraser in hand, whittle it down like a sculptor trying to reveal the image asking to come forth in a piece of wood. Which, by the way, except for a quick read-through to clean-up typos and spelling and such, I never do in these blog-posts, knowing they are ephemeral little thoughts and experiences not destined for posterity. Sometimes I think about combing through them all and cleaning them up for presentation, like getting your kid ready for church, and putting select pieces together in a printed collection. But having passed that 5,000 post mark, not too likely that that will ever happen!

 

Meanwhile, I put forth and erase as and when I can. And that erasing goes for sloppy patterned behavior in one’s own life! Start with that pink little nub and keep going!

Now about those clothes hangers. 

 

PS Simple solution. Erase the unworn clothes in my closer (well, take them to Goodwill) and I should have plenty of hangars!