Minutiae

 I changed my computer equipment in the shack.  A young guy came from out of town to help me set it up.  He’s a whiz at hardware and software and helps me remotely through a program called Team Viewer.  He upgraded my computer to increase its operating memory and fixed me up with a much better monitor.  It makes a big difference.  I’ll share his name and contact info if you message me.  Boomers need all the help they can get.

In preparation of his visit, I cleaned off my desk.  I’d planned to clean the shack, or at least the desk, for quite a while.  Things get dirty more quickly in the shack.  That or they don’t get cleaned as often.  The jury is out on that, though not according to my wife.  When she visits the shack she looks all around, pointing out things like cobwebs.  Her eyes are better than mine. 

I put everything from the desk in a cardboard box.  My desk and the nesting table under it holding the keyboard are made from the same slab of hickory.  I hadn’t seen it by itself, uncluttered, for years.  It was a custom-built gift, like other things in the shack, handmade by a person I know.  It’s a handsome piece of furniture.  When I washed it off and polished it, it looked even better.

After the new computer was set up, I slowly took things out of the box only as I needed them, with the hope that my desk remain relatively uncluttered.  It’s not working because clearly, I don’t need all these things. I want them.  Big difference.  Some things must be there.  Speakers, my web cam, the Alexa puck.  From there it gets fuzzy.

The first things I brought out of the box, tissues, was in response to clear need.  My nose was running.  I brought out one of my mom’s old custard cups that holds paper clips because, you guessed it, I needed a paper clip.

But when getting that out of the box, I saw the cool wooden pencil cup that our old neighbor on the farm, Henry Dunlap, turned on his lathe in his basement.  He gave it to me one day when I was a kid.  I rode my bike down the blacktop to his house to visit him.  I looked at the wooden cup in his woodshop, taking it off a shelf and turning it this way and that in my hands. 

“You like that?” Henry said.

“Yeah.  I like the rings around it.  The different colored wood.”

“It didn’t turn out the way I wanted.  How about you take that home?”

“Really?”

“Yeah.  Consider it a gift from your old neighbor.”

When I left on my bike, I put it the pouch of my hooded sweatshirt for the ride home.  I’ve had it ever since.

I keep binder clips, just another type of paper clip, and a nail clipper in there.  Could I put those things in the custard cup?  Sure.  Why not do that?  Because I like looking at Henry’s wooden cup.  Reminds me of home and him.  And that’s the way it starts.  Not a necessary object.  Desired.  Different standard.

I needed a pencil, so I fished around in the box and got one.  As I did, I saw my single pencil holder.  Everything has a story.  I’ll try to make this brief.

I was cutting up a skinny stick of spruce for my wood stove, and as I did, I saw it had a very small hole running through the center of the stick.  I thought the lead of a sharpened pencil might fit in there perfectly.  And it did.  I cut a short section of it off, stuck a pencil in it, and it fell over.  I made the next one a little taller. It stood up fine with the pencil inserted.

Perfect for keeping your often used Dixon Ticonderoga #2 Soft pencil handy and standing up.  It became a fixture on my desk.  I looked at it for weeks and thought it was missing something.  I looped a rubber band around the stick several times, gathered small feathers I had found in the yard over years and brought into the shack, and stuck them in the rubber band. 

There were the oriole feathers, the cardinal feathers, a very nice Blue Jay feather, and then some nicely striped gray and black feathers I can’t identify.  Maybe from a barred owl.  I stuck them in the rubber band, sticking up like the pencil.  They looked good.  A straight up yellow pencil backed by various colored and similarly positioned vertical feathers.  Hard to keep a thing as good as that hidden away in a box.

Soon after that I brought out my Waffle House coffee mug that holds more pencils, pens, scissors, the magnifying glass, the wrench that adjusts the gizmo that holds up my computer monitor. Think of it as a toolbox.   And where do you want your tools?  Handy.  Right on your desk.  And what better thing to hold them than a Waffle House cup?

Days went by.  I brought out the little wood cone I’d glued to a small piece of walnut.  I have some sturdy plastic toothpicks in there and a good straight pin.  Always good to have those on hand, toothpicks, and a pin.

That’s about it for useful desk items unless you count the paperweights.  I don’t find the need to weigh down paper often, but by God when that need arises, I have three of them.  Together if lying flat, which paperweights are designed to do, they take up too much space.  I want to see the grain of the hickory too.  So, I’ve decided to rotate them.

I’m starting with the heavy glass dome given to me by a family friend named Kerem.  The glass catches light and magnifies a very detailed painted scene plastered to the bottom of the dome depicting five Turkish bigwigs at what is possibly an important meeting in a room with mosaic tiled walls.  Maybe an ancient Turkish castle or mosque.  Very pretty shades of blue.  Seems as if I always see something different in there. 

Kerem is a Turkish man who studied in Chicago and went on to become a successful engineer specializing in metals.  He and my daughter Moe were a big help building the shack.  I don’t see him anymore, but when I see that paperweight, I think of him. 

The other two paperweights are a gorgeous, polished geode and a beautiful piece of green glass which was pressed into an old New Orleans water meter and bears its imprint.  You can’t hide these things away for good.  At least I can’t.

The last thing out of the box is the least necessary and most frivolous.  It’s a cupped piece of red glass that I bought on Bainbridge Island in Washington State from a woman who made various things and sold them in her yard.  She made the cast concrete image of her mother’s face with a bird’s wings wrapped around it which hangs on one of my oak trees.  After I bought that face, I bought a little piece of red textured art glass that reminded me of the tractor seats we sat in on the old Minneapolis-Moline tractors on our farm.

Those seats were mounted on a piece of steel like a diving board between the rear wheels.  When you drove over ridges in the field, like going across corn rows the wrong way, that seat tossed you up and down like a trampoline.  We stood most of the time.  I don’t know why that design caught my eye, but it did.

Today I was washing that piece of red glass (don’t know how it got so grimy) and saw it had cursive writing and a date etched on the back.  It was important to that woman on Bainbridge Island, or she wouldn’t have signed it.  And it’s also important to me or I wouldn’t still have it. 

But in this case, it’s not only the glass, it’s what I keep in the glass that I value.  I have a bunch of little rocks, tiny seashells, various found objects.  Anyone can spot and save big things they see on the beach or in the woods.  Little things are harder.  They’re small treasures.  Here’s a partial inventory.

A dried, beautifully tan, long dead, and complete June bug, a tiny worry doll from Guatemala, a small mottled piece of granite, a rock that looks all the world like a pinto bean, a tiny shard of green glass, a tiny solid metal top (maybe a dreidel) that doesn’t spin very well, various shells, an even tinier shard of white glass, a shell with a hole in it I was going to make a necklace with, a very round blue rock, what I thought was a rock that looked like a piece of wood which turned out to be an old dried half of an almond.  (Upon further review, I threw that away.)  Also in the mix is a miniature grey solid piece of metal that looks like a box and says “Altoids”, a broken piece of a metal gear of some kind, and to top it all off a splinter of wood with a hole in it that makes it look like the profile of a long beaked bird’s head.  An egret.  Maybe a heron.

I had a shiny buckeye in there too, but it was large and out of place, so I put it beside the piece of glass.  We had a buckeye tree in our timber when I was a kid, and I always carried one in my pocket.  You don’t come across a good buckeye like that very often. 

Buckeye and all, that little display is no bigger than your hand.  Lots of things in a small space. I like it.

While I was at it, I also brought out the very neat owl pellet I found under one of my oak trees last year.  I found it fits perfectly on top of a computer speaker.  And aside from the stuff that constantly changes; various notes, scratch paper, miscellaneous mail, scraps of paper kept to remind me of upcoming things, and bills I intend to pay, that is what’s on the desk.

Still in the box are two paper weights awaiting their turn on the desk, a checkbook, other bills I may never pay, and a small number of things headed for the waste basket and not worth mentioning.    

In the end my desk is nearly, though not quite, as cluttered as it was before.  What’s happening here?  What would Marie Kondo, the Japanese woman who wrote a book on tidying up, say about my approach?  She would say everything I keep should bring me joy.  It does. I hope your stuff brings you joy too.