My dad was an organized man.
He was an electrical engineer by trade, and a woodworker by avocation
who in his later life produced many fine pieces of furniture that the family
has kept among us. After he passed, we
found notebooks that listed every individual tool he ever bought at Sears,
where we used to go as a family on Friday nights. We would park out back in the lot where they
later built the annex, and walk in the back door by the loading dock. Mom would head over to the clothing sections
with whichever kid was next on the list for new clothes, or browse for fabrics
or household stuff. There was always
something on the list when you had seven kids.
Dad would head up to the second floor where the Craftsman
tools were on display, and I would follow up the escalator until we got to the
motorcycles, where I would peel off and spend the entire time sitting on the
mopeds and pretending I was cruising down the highway (or the sidewalk), or
drooling over the scooters or the big black beautiful Allstate 250, which
really was an Austrian-made Puch with two exhaust pipes coming out of a single
two-stroke cylinder, a “twingle”, as it was known at the time. I think I was ten or eleven at the time, but
I already knew I was born to be wild.
It was a simpler time, when a set of ¼” drive sockets from
3/16” up to ½” would be listed in the book as costing $1.95 in 1963. The family soon learned to send my brother to
collect me on the way out the door, where we always stopped by the famous candy
counter back at the foot of the escalator around the corner from the exit, a
place of magic where you could buy Chick-O-Sticks by the pound, and the drive
home would be quiet other than the sound of chomping and the smacking of lips.
My dad was a wise man.
He knew that, when you’re in the middle of a project, and you need a
particular screw for a task, it made sense to acknowledge that if you needed it
once, you will probably need it again sometime, so he always bought a few
extra. Over the years, the collection of
tools and hardware got bigger and bigger, which posed its own problem: How do you find what you want when you want
it? Stuff needs storage, and storage
costs money. It’s that simple.
Storage also costs time, and thought, and organization. In his shop, he lined the wall above the work
benches with a series of hand made cabinets, all with doors made from pegboard
for airflow set in birch frames. Some of
the doors would open to reveal a particular set of wrenches, say, each in its
own slot or hanging from its own hook.
Often there would be a few pullout drawers in a special frame inside the
cabinet that held smaller wrenches, or related things like sharpening stones in
the cabinet where the planes were stored.
Like was stored with like, and the bench was always clean, other than
the tins that held the parrafin-soaked rags with which he wiped down each tool
every time he put it away at the end of the night. You can see the same tendencies in mechanics
in the shop. You’ll notice the ones who
lay everything they need to do a job on a handy cart to start a job, and
carefully replace them in their proper place at the end of the shift, cleaned
and wiped and ready for the next day.
Often, the trend continues to personal appearance, and I suspect a link
between the ones who keep their coveralls clean and neat and the ones with the
well-organized toolboxes.
Around the corner in Dad’s last shop, at the place they
built in Port Angeles, were a series of free-standing shelves, crammed to the
top with individual plastic boxes, each subdivided into sections with inserted
plastic walls. One would be full of pop
rivets, another of cotter pins, another of washers of all sizes and types (I snagged
that one). You could literally stock a
hardware store with his lifetime collection, but none of us were ready to take
on that responsibility at the time, so we sent the entire pile off to the
auctioneers, where they may very well have done just that. They were all individually labeled with peel-and-stick
labels you spit out of a squeeze gun.
All the spare belts for the lawn mowers and the string for the weed
eaters, and the various lube oils and spare parts that you need to have around
so you can fix anything that breaks on the spot were on those shelves, for many
years in some cases.
It’s a certain type of person who can appreciate that level
of organization as something to strive for and be proud of, and I think I
inherited some of that from the old man.
My mother must have known when she gave me a name the letters of which
can be re-arranged to spell “anal”.
And yet, much to my dismay, I discover that these values are
not universally shared, even among the closest members of my own
household. When I mildly point out that,
in order to get the most life out of those bath towels and extend the time
before they deteriorate to the point of becoming “dog towels”, which are stored
on a completely different shelf in the closet, it behooves us to carefully sort
them when replacing the ones that just went in the laundry basket so the next
one up is the one that has been sitting on the shelf the longest. And if I go on to point out that the best way
to accomplish this goal is to take all of them out every time and put the ones
on the bottom of the pile on the back of the shelf on the towel racks in the
bathroom, then replace the towels-in-waiting back on the shelf in the same order,
well, would not a reasonable person conclude the obvious value of such a
system?
But no, what I get instead are eye-rolls, and sneers, and
snorts of derision! I don’t understand
it. My suggestion to use post-it notes
to date each towel as it went back on the shelf was rejected outright.
And look at the plates in the dining room! Would it not make perfect sense, I ask, to
always replace the currently washed plates on the Bottom of the stack, thus
ensuring that each plate gets used once in turn, and no plate gets
overused? You would think they would be
grateful for such insights, and eagerly agree to adopt such a system! Especially since I do all the dishes!
But no, instead I get snarls, or amused chuckles, depending
on the climate. It’s enough to make me
go out in the garage and work on sorting nuts and bolts. I’m getting the stainless steel ones separated
from the Allen heads, which are sorted differently than the cap screws, which
are sorted by grade and length. It’s
gonna be great! :-{)}
