By Jim Hagarty
I have always been in awe of the extent of my good fortune.
While most people on Earth spend at least some part of their lives searching for the meaning of their existence, I have not had to do that and as long as I am a homeowner, I probably never will.
I know exactly why the Creator placed me on this planet. I have no doubt at all. I am here for one reason and one reason only: To clean up my garage.
That might not seem like a great reason to you, especially stacked up against the various destinies of greater people who’ve left this world a better place by virtue of their inventions, their art or their cures for incurable diseases. But after more than six decades of trying on various roles both professional and casual, I am always led back to what I know is my true calling – the tidying up of that 12-by-24-foot space designed to house my car but which, of course, never has. Instead, it has served as my family’s personal landfill site and from the start, I have been site supervisor.
Looking back, I guess I should have seen that my whole life was leading to this. As a kid, I spent many happy hours straightening up our basement, eventually graduating to our shed and finally, the garage. I’ve always been blessed by having been surrounded by people who feel that a good part of their life’s mission is to completely mess up the spaces that I am then self-assigned to rescue.
I can only imagine the emptiness of an existence spent in a home environment where everything is forever in its proper place. Where would be the challenge in that? Like mountain biking on the prairies.
Instead, nothing thrills me more than those times when the realization dawns on me that I will not be able to walk from the back door of my garage to the overhead door at the front without going outside and taking the sidewalk from one end of the building to the other. Navigating through the clutter on the inside might be possible, but from experience I know that the short journey cannot be made without falling down several times and risking impalement by various slender objects including hockey sticks, ski poles and garden rakes.
Now another person might institute rules for family members to follow to prevent such chaos or he might even establish a daily routine whereby a 10-minute clean-up would keep the space in good shape, but my experience has been that there is no fun in that.
I pity the poor soul who has never taken a scissors to a Saturday paper with a decluttering column in it or who has never surfed for decluttering tips till 3 a.m. like a sinner searching the Bible for Salvation or at least some loopholes.
Yes, few are the joys that can compare with seeing a garage floor emerge into the daylight which it has not seen in months and to the amazing discovery of objects that appeared to be lost forever.
What is most heartwarming of all is that, as the three-day clean-up nears its conclusion, the family members most responsible for the sorry state of affairs rediscover the space and re-occupy it, even as the supervisor sweeps away the last of the debris. And like shovelling the driveway during a snowstorm, it is strangely sweet to see the path filling back in almost instantly. The seeds of the next cleanup are sown so well in the one just being performed.
Looking back, I now know that the darkest period of my life were the three years I lived in a home I had bought which had no garage at all. So many wasted weekends I spent, broom and garbage can in hand with nothing to clean up. Defeated, I rented movies, read books and went for meaningless bike rides instead.
May I never experience such emptiness again.
