Really Big Jar

It happened when — shades of George Carlin — I was looking for a place to put some of my stuff.

The three-piece suits that were no longer in style, and those that no longer managed to fit me (inexplicably haven shrunken over the years), were really beginning to jam up the nether reaches of my closet. They were also beginning to gather a bit too much dust, and radiate too much musty fusty redolence of after shaves long past. They needed to go. As did my collection of thin and wide and long and longer neckties, silk and non-silk alike. I mean, after all, who the hell wears ties anymore, except politicians and preachers and shills and bunko artists (or am I merely being repetitive)?

Consignment to storage or disposal would also be the appropriate fate of my album collection. That’s right — albums. You know, those round, flat, vinyl things that predated not only CDs but also cassettes and 8-tracks too. I’m not sure that anyone is going to miss the best of Pablo Cruise or Christopher Cross or Boz Scaggs or Supertramp or Seals & Crofts, anyway.

And what about those 30 or 40 running feet of shelf space occupied by the dog-eared and yellowing editions of Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl (intermingled with a few not very noteworthy Archie and Casper and Flash comic books and a tome or two of Dr. Seuss)? Where could I cram all of those moldering volumes?

Then I ran across my assemblage of sports gear of ages past. It’s truly amazing how many mismatched miscellaneous stray pieces I had accumulated, despite not really being all that athletic in the first place: tennis racket, tees, bocce balls, horseshoe pin, croquet balls + one broken mallet, frisbee, nine marbles, torn volleyball net, three badminton birdies in varying states of decay, golf balls both orange and white, kneepads (for what sport I could no longer determine), one cleated shoe with no laces, kid-size first baseman’s glove, air pump with no nozzle, three intact and two torn cornhole beanbags of varying colors, set of darts with dull or bent points and shredded fletching, cracked squirt gun, thirteen checkers with water-stained board, and lord knows what else is down in the bottom of that moldy toy chest. I am really tired of tripping over this stuff. Couldn’t I just UPS all this to that fabled Land of Lost Toys and let all those little elves or whoever sort it out?

Please don’t get me started on that hall closet full of school memories, either! How many stained felt pennants with exceptionally poor team logos can one really stand to look at for more than a week? Where do I put the prom pictures in cheap cardboard frames? The pom-poms dropping their once brightly colored crepe shreds? The $1-a-dozen gilded plastic trophies topped by baseballers, footballers, basketballers, and even a single clarinetist? The curling faded photos of the class nature trip to Williamsburg (where Jeffy Filchmeat threw up into that nasty counselor’s sleeping bag!)?

That’s when I found the jar! Problems solved!