Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
I’ve been making discoveries in our garage, and reflecting upon how we treat ourselves when it comes to or stuff.
Discovering two boxes of framed pictures, including photographs from before and after the frabjous dancing on our wedding day, I asked my wife Kate why all these priceless artifacts were boxed away. She conjectured that we probably packed them up when we moved to our current house in 2004, and haven’t thought to go through them since.
Garages, crawl spaces, and attics are dangerous for this reason: they give us space to forget the joys and burdens we have packed away. Inspired by Kate’s mom’s recent downsizing from a four-bedroom house to a two-bedroom condominium, my sister-in-law decided that she, too, was going to engage in some “Swedish Death Cleaning.”
Do you know the term? Made popular by the Margareta Magnusson book The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter, the term “Death Cleaning” comes from the Swedish word döstädning, where dö meaning “death” and städning meaning “cleaning.” The thinking is that you have a better sense than your eventual heirs of what, if anything, of your possessions would be worth keeping. As a college student who both read a lot of biographies of writers, and who had literary ambitions myself, I used to imagine that the curiosities I collected would make for fascinating sifting for my eventual biographer. I was confused. Now I am doing the sifting, and I feel like I am having a time-traveling conversation with my earlier self, asking him to throw things out in the present so that a future self won’t have to take valuable time to make sense of them, or make room for them.
An English major with a love of reading, I note again that books have always been an enthusiasm of mine, for my collections have numbered in the thousands, probably as much as ten thousand. Today my laptop and iPhone still reflect that enthusiasm. While my current digital collections of books will not provide treasures for some future librarian to interpret, at least the Kindle and Audible format of my books will make it easy for my daughter Geneva or one of the other kids merely to say, “No thanks. Delete.” Downsizing my collections is one of the kindest gifts I can give Geneva and her brothers and, for a few more decades yet, also myself.
Yesterday I delivered about ten boxes of effects to the SPCA. They took everything except the clothes and the space heaters. After I make a few more runs to the SPCA and the Davis Public Library, we will finally have enough room for our bikes and our car to pull into the garage easily, without precision driving. “Three moves equals a fire,” a friend once told me. If I can devote about six more weekends to the garage, we would have the freedom, if not the necessary funds, to move to a new house within Davis, even if we eventually decide to stay put. And my future self will thank my current self for the sustained act of kindness and self-regard.
What sort of conversations are you having with yourself about all that junk you own?
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on core American values, such as freedom from junk. Other topics will include the city of Miami, sweaty humans, long hiatuses, Orion reports, delightful snacks, trips to the forest, last dances, favorite stories, ecology, the Golden Globes, company for France, necessary bonds, kinky song anagrams, authors other than Yeats and Beckett, science fiction films, Spanish words, the prevention of commerce, memoirs, impartiality in the courtroom, famous articles, numbers that are divisible by nine, softball questions, Ray Charles, the start of school, amino acids, accomplished players, unfortunate alliances in the South Pacific, pool-time fun, robots, and Shakespeare.
Valerie Wallace joins us from Chicago as the featured poet at Poetry Night this coming Thursday night at 8. I would love to see you at the Natsoulas Gallery to help me welcome this important visiting writer.
See you this evening!
Your Quizmaster
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Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- Verbs that start with the letter T. What two-syllable T verb means “to engage in a vigorous struggle or scuffle”?
- Current Events – Names in the News. On 4 September 2018, Arif Alvi was elected as 13th President of what country of 194 million people?
- Sports. What is the only NFL team that plays its home games in the state of New York?
P.S. Do you appreciate these little quotations at the end of the newsletters? Here’s another: “A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.” ― George Carlin