Maintaining a Consistent Junk Quotient

I have embarked on an energetic effort to lower my junk quotient. Your JQ is the amount of junk you accumulate over the years. Junk grows exponentially.

I am motivated in this effort by the fear that my junk will soon reach some critical point beyond which it cannot be contained. I see myself dying in my house, literally inundated by junk as the Collyer brothers were 40 years ago.

The Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, had isolated themselves for nearly four decades in their three-story Brownstone house in Harlem. Homer, blind and paralyzed, never left it. Langley went out at night to forage. In 1942, a policeman knocked on the door to check a report that Homer was dead. He found the house stacked from floor to ceiling with newspapers and junk. Langley led him on his hands and knees through a tunnel that was booby-trapped with tons of rubbish to a second-floor clearing where a very-much-alive Homer sat. The next day Langley appeared at the police station to protest this intrusion.

I am reminded of this horror by Ben Thomerson of Redlands, who sends me an article on the Collyer brothers written for the Horizon winter edition of 1969 by Robert Crowley.

When police broke into the house on March 21, 1947, they found every door and window blocked by stacks of newspapers and junk. Homer’s body was found that day in his clearing. Nineteen days later Langley’s body was found under a pile of rubbish loosed by one of his own booby traps. In all, 18 tons of junk were removed from the house.

To me, the most chilling part of that story is the explanation Langley once gave for saving the newspapers: When Homer regained his sight, he said, “he can catch up on the news.”

That is the great fallacy behind irrational hoarding. Those who are afflicted with this compulsion actually believe that someday everything will come in handy.

Coincidentally, Verne Kilian sends me an article from the February Psychology Today on “Pack Rats: World-Class Savers,” by Lynda W. Warren, a psychologist, and Jonnae C. Ostrom, a clinical social worker.

They define pack rats as “those who collect, save or hoard insatiably, often with only the vague rationale that the items may someday be useful. And because they rarely winnow what they save, it grows and grows.”

In time, they say, the collection grows beyond redemption. “There is too much stuff to manage without spending enormous amounts of time and effort. . . . And since even heroic efforts at cleaning bring barely visible results, such unrewarding efforts are unlikely to continue. . . .”

As I may have hinted before, my wife finds it hard to throw anything away. She has a trunkful of old hats. Cartons full of remnants. Though she has more than 1,000 cook books, she continues to save the weekly food sections. She also saves the travel section, because someday she is going to Bali Bali or Macao or Timbuktu.

Mind, I don’t mean to suggest that she’s reclusive or crazy, or even odd; in every other respect she’s the most healthy, competent and stable woman I know. But she is a world-class saver.

So I’m doing what I can to reduce the total impedimenta at our house. I’m trying to set a good example. Recently I gave about 200 books and several suits, sweaters and robes to Goodwill Industries.

I was going to give them a vermilion plaid sports coat I’d worn only two or three times and hadn’t worn for years. The last time I wore it, to a cocktail party, a woman said, “Where did you leave the horse?” But when it came to parting with it, I couldn’t do it. There might be a time and place for it.

So you can see that the resistance toward discarding anything that you might once have valued is strong even in a perfectly normal person like me.

I had reason to hope briefly that my industry might have prodded my wife into taking her bull by the horns. She said, “Did you notice what I did in the garage?”

I went down to look and saw that the garage did indeed seem neater. The boxes were neatly stacked and aligned and everything looked more compact and orderly.

But I suspect that she didn’t throw a single thing away.