David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published April 6, 2004

My corner in purgatory will be a tad cluttered

If cleanliness is indeed next to godliness, I fear I may be condemned to a purgatorial afterlife. I'm not a slob, but I'm not a neat-freak either. I comfort myself in the thought that if the slobs go to hell and the neat-freaks go to heaven, at least I'll have lots of good company in purgatory. I suspect most of us lie somewhere in the middle of the cleanliness spectrum. We're not too dirty, but we're not all that clean either.

Take, for instance, the garage. You can tell a lot about families by their garages. There are some folks whose garages are so jam-packed with doodads, gadgets, trinkets, machinery, contraptions, dohickeys and watchamacallits that their cars have been banished to the driveways and streets, doomed to spend their days pounded by punishing rain, brutal sunlight and curious cats' dirty pawprints. A rule of thumb -- if you can't see four walls, it's time for a garage sale.

On the other end of the cleanliness spectrum are the garages that are so neat and tidy that they make you want to sneak in during the middle of the night and junk it up a bit. You could maybe place a dead car battery in the corner, spill some oil on the floor, haphazardly drop a pile of tools on a shelf. That'd do it.

We Spateses can still get our cars in our garage, but sometimes it's a challenge. Not too neat, but not too messy - that's us. Swing open the minivan door too widely and you're likely to crash into a tricycle. If you're looking for a wrench, you'd better prepare to search. It'll be in there, but it may take you a while to find it. That oil stain? It adds character, or so I tell the wife.

And that's just the garage. It was half-clean, half-messy before we had kids. They can't mess it up too much. What they can do, however, is mark their territory in the rest of the house. Like two male cats with overactive bladders, my kids feel the need to make sure everyone knows this is their domain.

In our pre-child life (PCL for short), the wife and I could get the house ready for visitors in an hour, maybe two. It was always a bit cluttered, but nothing unmanageable -- a dirty sock here, an unmade bed there, a two-day-old pizza box in the kitchen. An out-of-town college buddy was coming by? No problem! See you soon! A set of parents wanted to stop in? Come on over! The more the merrier!

But that was then, the PCL era. This is now, the ACL era, after-child life. Things change in the ACL. If an old college buddy wants to visit these days, I require a minimum of three days' notice. It takes us that long to scrub the crayon marks off the walls, jackhammer the applesauce out of the carpet, change the bedding stained with Juicy-Juice, and finish the 38 loads of laundry that have accumulated in the last, oh, four days. When that's done, it takes a few more hours to pick up the 819 toys, sippy cups and baking pans that have been strewn about, all the while the 15-month-old wrecking ball and his nearly-3-year-old mob don sister do their best to unclean the cleaning the wife and I just finished.

Clean? Ha! It's a relative term.

We've all known people for whom clean means that not even a dirty plate sully the inside of a dishwasher. These are the people whose houses are cleaner and more orderly than museums. Even if it could, dirt wouldn't dare take up residence. It's so clean it's unnerving. You're practically afraid to exhale for fear that you might defile an end table with your filthy carbon dioxide.

On the other end of the spectrum are people who are so incredibly messy that they don't even realize the depth of their pigginess. When you open the refrigerator, the shelves are covered with a three-fourths-inch-thick layer of goo comprised of years' worth of spilled jellies, sauces, congealed steak juices, pizza sweat and pickle brine that have been left unattended. The toilet bowls have evolving, higher-level organisms living in them, and nobody can recall the carpet's original color. And even though you may be morbidly curious about what treasures may lie in the couch-cushion cracks, I beg you -- and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough -- I BEG you not to put your hand down there. I have a cousin who did this and lost his arm from the elbow down. We don't know what happened, exactly. We prefer it that way.

As I compare house to house to house, I rate mine smack-dab in the middle of the class. If cleanliness is next to godliness, I just hope He's grading on a curve.

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@chartertn.net.