“What is this?” Mary Ellen asked me the other day as she dangled a doodad in front of my face. It was small, white, plastic, hexagonal in shape, and had several grooves. “It looks like it “goes to something,” she said.
“I don’t know what it is,” I responded, which I prayed would end the discussion, but I knew it wouldn’t because my wife just can’t leave a thingamajig alone. She has to know what it’s for.
“Put it somewhere in case we ever need it. It looks important.”
“So you want me to keep it because we don’t know what it is for?”
“Exactly.”
“Of course, if we did know what it was for, we’d also keep it. So, I guess we keep everything.”
“Don’t be silly, some things don’t go to anything. We can throw those things way. We only keep things that look important.”
I knew exactly what she meant. I have an entire drawer filled with things that look important. But I don’t think I will ever really need them.
Last week, I decided to clear out the mess that had accumulated in my office over the years. Why not begin with Mary Ellen’s doodad. I was one hundred percent sure that nothing in our house required anything quite like that. But there was only one way to really be sure that it was not important, that it didn’t go to anything. I’d throw it away.
I tossed it in the waste basket next to my desk and listened as it nestled to the bottom and came to rest with an audible thud. I knew I had a small window of opportunity left to retrieve it if necessary: two days before I emptied the office waste basket in the garage receptacle; then another day before the sanitation department picked up all the week’s trash. That gave me some time to rescue the thing when the inevitable happened and I realized I had thrown way something important that went to something.
A few days later, I heard the familiar sound of the garbage truck pulling away. Whatever that thing was, it was now gone forever. Just a matter of time now before I found out what it was for. The next day…
“Dad, Mom wants me to mount the kitchen phone on the wall. She said she thinks you have the doohickey that does that. Do you know where it is?
“Yes, 10th and Raymond—at the city dump.”
“You threw that away? Dad, didn’t you know that it went to something?”
Yes, I knew it went to something. I just didn’t know what it went to.”
“Great, now it went to the dump?”
I headed upstairs. I removed the drawer from my desk, flipped it over and dumped the entire contents into the wastebasket: wooden knobs, old keys, pen tops, dozens of multi-colored plastic thingies, metal gizmos in various shapes and a rubber whatchamacallit with a hole in the middle. Within days, I would know the purpose of each item.
“What’s going on up there?” screamed Mary Ellen when she heard the thunderous clatter.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s not important…yet”
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