In Which I’m Getting Stuff Done

I’ve been cleaning out some spaces. The closet in the room that’s also my office has been pretty packed. First, there’s a filing cabinet on one side. My dad bought it from his workplace when they were replacing older ones. This one has deep, sturdy drawers. When my folks got new carpeting (quite a few years ago), the carpet layers moved furniture from one room, laid carpet, then replaced the furniture. Things went fine until they got to the closet with the filing cabinet. They were unable to budge it, and said it would have to be emptied so they could lay the final bit of carpet. The difficulty was my dad’s deep and abiding interest in pennies. He’d been a coin collector for years and the bulk of his collection was in safe deposit boxes at their bank. But, he’d kept the pennies in the filing cabinet, along with copies of his speeches from Toastmaters and various and sundry other things. Daddy and I hauled bank bags of pennies from the cabinet’s drawers and stashed them around the room, which, by then, had been re-carpeted and the furniture replaced. The carpet layers were able to move the much lighter filing cabinet, lay down the last bit of carpet, and replace cabinet. Daddy and I put all those pennies back into the filing cabinet, where they stayed for many more years.

After my parents were both gone, and my sister and I had gone through the house, deciding what each of us would keep and what would be part of an estate sale, David and I moved in. I kept the nice big filing cabinet in the closet and used it for my own files. I also store all my other office stuff, like paper and file folders and index cards and things like that on shelves on the opposite side of the closet. There’s a small chest on that side, too, which has rolls of contact paper and empty picture frames in the drawers.

The space has been crammed with stuff I used for teaching everyone from community college students to Sunday School teachers to preschoolers. I’ve been going through things. Rigorously.

I can now see the closet’s floor. Yes, I can. It’s been quite a while. Maybe as long ago as when the closet was re-carpeted.

When I look at the bags and boxes of things I’ve removed from the closet, it’s immense. I’m not quite sure if I could put it all back in there. But, I’m not going to try. What has come out is staying out. The closet rather reminds me of the Tardis, which is the blue telephone booth that Dr. Who travels around in. Everyone who goes into the Tardis is astonished by how much bigger than a phone booth the place is. The official explanation that the alien Doctor gives to puzzled companions is that the Tardis is “dimensionally transcendental.” That means that the inside and the outside of the ship exist in separate dimensions. Dimensions allow scientists to locate something in space and time.

Dimensional transcendentalism was the state wherein an object’s interior was bigger than its exterior, an effect made possible by transdimensional engineering. I don’t understand any of that. I’m just pretty sure that I couldn’t possibly get all the stuff that came out of the closet back into the closet. And I do not plan to try.

And, in other news: