Purging during a pandemic
Intent on a purge for a year or so, the global spread of Covid19 gives me a perfect opportunity to begin.
For a depressed introvert like me, self-quarantine feels like a paradise even when you hear hoofbeats underscoring the Nightly News. I get to be alone with my wife, Melanie, who I love, binge TV, write, read books, ride out the Apocalypse with my soulmate, and get paid for my service by the government. What’s not to love? The idea of an unraveling purge makes the quarantine even better. Opening the door to the refrigerator, cluttered with CDC recommendations for stocking up, I fume when I can’t reach the beer. While attempting to clear a way, I see fuzzy beards of growing gray green mold on left-behind strawberries, meatloaf, and whatever-it-was entombed in multiple styrofoam take-home boxes.
Firing along bright orange rivers of neurons, my OCD genes go on full alert, goose-stepping with military salutes.
This means war.
On a righteous crusade against filthy clutter, armed with a military arsenal of germ-killing sprays, I manage to free a Corona Light, making note of the irony while I chug it down. Hours later, lost in the ecstasy of unshackled mental illness, I stare at our kitchen inventory spread out on counters, tables, and floors. Of each item, I repeatedly ask the same question first framed by Marie Kondo, international best-selling author of “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”:
Does this thing spark joy?
If not, she insists, purge.
For someone already wrestling with depression, self-quarantined during a pandemic, reading text alerts about virus epicenters, stock market bottoms, beaches crowded by spring-breakers, deranged Trump tweets, and Tom Hanks infected, I find it impossible for any used kitchen item to spark anything of consequence in me.
A stained cotton dish towel with a 1981 calendar doesn’t cut it.
43 miniature yellow corn cob holders, you have to be kidding.
A red toaster with only one burner, no chance.
26 different spatulas, keep one metal and one plastic.
Thermos bottles and Tupperware without matching lids, not even for Goodwill.
27 shot glasses, stating various reasons to drink, including the one promoting Ohio, sparks a hold-out for joy.
As Melanie tempers some of my choices for sentimental and logistical reasons, she understands my joy resides not in any one thing, but the bug-eyed process of eliminating clutter — the tidy, antiseptic, tight and cleverly spaced, visually pleasing, sparkling illusion of control.
Just before midnight, the kitchen purge complete, I revel in clean lines, correct order, and overall beauty. With comic pride I look at Melanie and proclaim victory:
Covid19 be damned.
We both laugh because it’s what we love to do. •
History and evolution teach us the necessity of an occasional purge -- windblown fire through parched land, plague of locust or novel virus, tsunami spilling out radioactive havoc.
The gods take their pick and begin to laugh like all hell breaking loose. All of creation, the apostle informs us, groans in the face of grinding teeth, the strong and rich naturally selected to eat the weak and poor.
Mad prophets continually scream stark revelation: our greed catalyzes destruction -- planetary abuse, lust for power, blood spilling into pristine rivers, various sources of pollution, cancer, virus overflowing, the human stains.
If you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you.
It seems Mother Earth, womb fuse of animating force, can only stomach so much.
•
In the heart of night, under a waning crescent moon, spooning in deep sleep, Melanie and I startle to the sound of siren, the frenetic warning of our increasingly dysfunctional septic system. When the traditional fix of repeatedly banging a floating metal ball with a broken broom handle fails, I remind Melanie that shit happens. It’s perfect theology.
More than 70 years ago, author C.S. Lewis wrote of our ongoing and current predicament.
It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
Siren powered off, Melanie and I pray together, refocusing on a gospel hope too good to be true, a cosmic and comic foolishness interrupting certain tragedy.
Slipping back into dream, I hear the prophet fulfilled.
The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned.
In my dream, pandemic in kaleidoscope, fear retreats. Over time, we get through this together. Fear retreating, lessons learned, people are free to love, shift priorities, release idols, care for each other and our planet, count profit by sacrifice, participate in a strange and divine redemption.
All of the law, Jesus reminds us, blooms in two realities: Love God, love others. When I awake, faced with another day of self quarantine, my wife calls the plumber, who estimates a large bill. Blurry-eyed, I smile when I turn and see again our kitchen restored to its intended beauty and order.
I pledge our bedroom for the next lovely purge.
