I just thought of a really good explanation; the fact that I could have used it fifteen years ago when it was relevant doesn’t make it any less entertaining. We were at the time in our second year renting an apartment, and the thought of a year three in said apartment brought no joy to our hearts. Then we got a call from a real estate agent we knew. He had two apartments to show us that were for sale, one with three bedrooms and the other the five-bedroom apartment we’re in now and will sadly be leaving sooner than I’d like to think. He questioned why we were interested in the bigger place, as the only occupants would be three of us (plus Mimi, our one cat at the time). Barbara explained that I had a lot of stuff and therefore needed more room than your typical family. A more inventive answer would have been that we had only two bears to work with instead of the normal three!

It’s not exactly like why one needs three shuls on a desert island, but it’s sort of the same idea. As we all know, the first bear in the story found everything too big, too hard, too hot, while the second bear found everything just the opposite: too small, too soft, too cold. It was the third bear for whom everything was hunky-dory. But for us there was no third bear anywhere in sight. One apartment we were being shown was too small; one was too big; and there weren’t any just the right size. So we took the bigger one, which is why we have had all this space to store all the stuff we had crammed into our lift, and, as I have made clear, a diminishing window of opportunity years later to repent of our sins and declutter.

Anyone who chances to wander through the two back rooms of our apartment may notice the 30+ storage boxes of photographs, plus the sixty or so framed pictures that were left over from my last exhibition. (Double Chai: A Thirty-Six Year Retrospective by Fred Casden, October 3-29, 2006, Waltuch Gallery, JCC on the Palisades) But what’s in our storeroom in the cartons that we haven’t touched since we moved here? Maybe we should tackle that mess sooner, rather than later, at least to see what’s there.

To put you in a proper frame of mind for this adventure, let’s pretend (here we go again!) that you are the one assisting your aged parents in their move from the house they lived in for forty years. In their garage you find your father’s old 3-speed Schwinn bicycle, perfectly ridable once you blow up the tires. In the attic, there’s your mother’s old manual typewriter, perfectly usable if you can replace the ribbon. There’s the wooden tennis racket that you haven’t looked at since you were in summer camp. What’s in that box? OMG, it’s your dad’s old slide rule from his days trying to survive calculus; and there’s more, as in a nearly complete set of Encyclopedia Brittanica, c. 1950. All these are items that could be used, but by whom? Maybe the Salvation Army or the Goodwill Industry would take them – assuming there’s one in your area; maybe not. Either way, these relics of the past have to go, if necessary left by the curb, because one person’s trash…

And so, there we were in our machson, wading through all of our clutter. Fred, do you know you have three Apple keyboard boxes? Uh, no, which is the default answer.Speaking of boxes, there were three gas masks, still in their original packages from years ago when the government was handing them out. That medieval looking device on the shelf is the trap we were given to catch the vole that had briefly taken up residence in our apartment. And yes, we have a disaster’s supply of bottled water, something everyone should have.

Undeterred by all the clutter, Barbara seized the moment. Like many households, we had enough luggage stored away to travel around the world several times. Swap groups, anyone? Within a few days, several of the suitcases were gone. (How can anyone use a case that only has two wheels? Lots of people are too young to remember when these things had no wheels at all and you shlepped them around. But I digress.) We also found a home for a perfectly good aluminum folding table that had been hugging the same wall unused, unloved, and in the way for all these years. At least, I could now reach the boxes in questions and pull them out. Do I want to know what’s inside? Not really, but here goes.

The question could be asked: Fred, what were you thinking when you brought all that stuff with you? The answer might be: I wasn’t thinking, or perhaps, I was in denial about what was going to happen to me here in The Land. Or better, what wouldn’t be happening to me, as in I wouldn’t be having a place for a darkroom – the way I always did in NJ – or access to the supplies I needed. Plus, seventeen years ago when we first arrived, water was less than abundant here. (Should I make a cup of coffee or develop my film? Shoutout to the water company for solving a problem.) No surprise, for all these years, my paraphernalia collected dust, and the chemicals, over the years, (I even brought over bottles of chemicals!!!) lost their potency – the way politicians often do. The chemicals, that’s easy, just dump them down the toilet.  But the plastic tanks in which I developed film and the trays I used to make the prints that are in the 30+ boxes? Everything in these cartons still works – as would the manual typewriter or the old tennis racket stored in someone’s attic. But they’ve all had their day in the sun. My darkroom equipment is not going to get used again, so it’s not going with us to THE apartment.

We don’t have a curb where we can leave our discards, but we have something similar, it’s our informal neighborhood gemach. Leave your I-don’t-wants between the green bins for garbage and the orange ones for recycling. Someone is sure to find a use for whatever it is. Almost always. But a plastic cannister to develop black and white film? That’s stretching it. There was nothing for me to do but toss my stuff unceremoniously in the recycle bins. At least the plastic can be recycled. Maybe it will. Next week, we’ll think about my precious enlarger also collecting dust. I can imagine putting it outside and lots of my neighbors staring at in bewilderment.  Ma zeh?

But that’s next week. A little good-old-fashioned procrastination in this matter might do me a world of good.