Dr. Carolyn Lee reflects on a different cliché each week. Recently, in her blog “Like a Kid in a Candy Shop,” she looks at the decision-dilemma caused by our obsession with choice. This week Carolyn explores the cliché, a place for everything.
Learn more about Dr. Carolyn Lee on her biography page or investigate 29 more clichés in her latest book, Keep Your Eye on the Ball And Other Clichès to Live By.
A Place for Everything
When I was twelve years old, my family moved from Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, to High Ridge, which we thought of as “out in the country.” Our new, two-story, frame house sat at the end of a long, curving driveway, and it was surrounded by fifteen acres of pine trees and fruit trees, rose bushes and lilac bushes, and beds of iris and daisies. We had a grape arbor, a rabbit hutch, a clearing in the woods for barbecues and picnics. The house itself seemed like Tara to me. For the first time, I had a room of my own; there was a sunroom and a little “library.” But of all the new and exciting places to explore, the area of our new property that interested me the most was our basement. And the thing I found most fascinating about it was that it was such a mess. Total chaos. The old guy who had sold us the house was a pack rat of the first order. He had left nearly everything behind, including Duke, his enormous, bad-tempered tri-color collie. His basement was filled with yard equipment, garden tools, hardware of every sort, and cleaning products, plus an assortment of dusty Mason jars filled with preserved fruits and vegetables and shelves of canned goods with dubious expiration dates.
I cannot explain why my twelve-year-old self found all this disarray so fascinating or why on earth I would have wanted to put it in order. But much of that first summer in High Ridge I spent in our new basement with my father, sorting through a wide variety of detritus. I sifted through kegs of nails and separated them according to size. I distinguished among the half-dozen varieties of wrenches and pliers and screwdrivers; I cleaned drill bits. I tossed out the things that were rusted or rotten. My father provided me with stacks of empty cigar boxes and a roll of adhesive labels. I filled those boxes and printed those labels with “picture-hanging devices,” “cup hooks,” “butterfly catches,” “upholstery tacks,” and “miscellaneous drawer-pulls.”
I think my father was surprised by my meticulous attention to detail and pleased that I seemed to be getting such satisfaction from this tedious chore. I look back at those consecutive days in the basement of our High Ridge house as my first opportunity to express what has become a lifelong passion for organization.
My pencil box, my bookshelves, my record collection, my scrapbooks and my photograph albums were always models of orderliness. There was something about putting things in categories that appealed to me; I loved to arrange things in a meaningful sequence. Neatly labeling them with a felt-tipped pen gave me a real rush. All of my good friends became aware and appreciative of my interest in setting things straight, and they happily allowed me access to their pantries, refrigerators, spice cabinets, recipe boxes, address books, and sock drawers in order that I might express that aspect of my personality. If I had received minimum wages for my efforts in this field, I could now retire to a thatch-roofed cottage on the Isle of Skye.
What began as an affinity for tidying up and physically placing things into categories developed into a love of dividing ideas or written materials into sensible pieces and arranging those pieces in a logical, sometimes even compelling or dramatic sequence. It eventually became my responsibility to share my love of sequence and order with students who were attempting to write papers and screenplays. They rarely shared my enthusiasm for organization, nor were they ready to buy into the theory that outlining material made writing easier, not harder. The remarks I most frequently wrote in the margins of student papers were “Where are you going with this?” Or “I’m not following you.” I often could detect no plan whatsoever, no scheme at all. I can recall examples of projects in a cinematography class that were nothing more than a succession of random shots, carelessly spliced together with no thought about meaningful structure. They were formless, shapeless films that their creators somehow thought were “arty.”
I read once that art is the result of applying order and structure to the chaos of life. This was an opinion that Stephen Sondheim repeated often. Once, when interviewed about wanting rules and structure in music, Sondheim said, “Yeah. Order out of chaos. I think that’s what art’s about, anyway. I think that’s why people make art.” He went on to express the idea that “making forms gives you solidarity.” He believed that’s why people paint paintings and take photographs and write music and tell stories. He even went so far as to suggest that stories are most satisfying when they have beginnings and middles and ends. What a novel idea!
Not everyone feels led to compose music or write a screenplay. But everyone has opportunities to choose structure over chaos. You might laugh if you were to open the door of my spice cabinet. There they are, almond extract to wasabi powder, in alphabetical and artistic order.
What’s after A Place For Everything?
After reading A Place for Everything, check out Dr. Carolyn Lee’s blogs on her website, she features a new cliché each week or you can order her new book, Keep Your Eye on the Ball And Other Clichès to Live By. Want to know more about the woman behind the words? Read more about Carolyn here. We hope you enjoyed this article learning more about the cliché, a place for everything.
