Are You a Felix or an Oscar?

My young neighbor just started his first year at the University of Iowa and is rooming with a teammate from high school; they both play football for the Hawkeyes. His mom tells me that the roommate is a neat freak: all his clothes are organized by category (dress shirts, t-shirts, pants, jeans) and they all hang uniformly on thick black plastic hangers. A tidy hamper sits in the closet, too. That neighbor's mom says her own son is a slob. Most times he can't tell which clothes are clean and which are dirty. She wonders how they'll work it out.

My daughter's new roommate has those Felix Ungar tendencies. She's got their university apartment looking nicer than a Pottery Barn showroom (only nicer because she's also mixed in flea market finds and her own artwork on the walls). She brought in a toothbrush holder for their bathroom with a sanitizing top that goes over the heads of the toothbrushes and somehow rotates throughout the night. My daughter is definitely of the slovenly sportswriter gene pool, ala Oscar. I wonder how they will work it out.

My mom and dad are coming to visit Thursday and my mom, she is a Felix, through and through. There is not one corner in her house to which she has not thrown her attention. The only things in my corners lately are cobwebs. Hey, September is for spiders, isn't it? So, keeping in mind my "good is good enough" mantra, I've got to clean up around here. Tomorrow I'm going to make a list. I think I might need to buy some furniture polish. I have plans to touch up the chipped paint on all the corners on the first floor but that might not happen. I have this big pile of I-don't-know-what in an alcove in the big bedroom, including a laundry basket of upholstery fabric and a lamp on its side. And on the window ledge in our kitchen, above the "baking counter," there are these items:

1. football cleat tightener
2. foggy binoculars from when I dropped them in East Pike Lake trying to see a moose
3. a mini flashlight
4. my son's duffel bag nametag
5. a dish of paper clips
6. some lighter fluid
7. a half-pak of Tropical Twist Trident

It feels like the Clampetts live here. I think of the pleasure my mom might have scooping all this detritus into a trash bag with the back of her hand. . . .

In a New York Times article on messiness (April 29, 2003), the writer shares a story about his friend:

"My friend Pam, certain that she could make neatniks of her young children, devised a clever strategy. 'They had shoebox-size toy boxes into which I would sort their toys by type, with the type indicated by a Polaroid on the end showing what was supposed to be in that box: Legos, soldiers, crayons, tiny cars and trucks,' she said.

'''The idea was that the kids would learn to sort the inevitable mess in each box before they could read. Wrong. I spent hours on their floors, sorting, while they watched, with bewilderment and then increasing amusement as they got older.'''

One of my own friends from high school had her first baby quite young and so began setting up a home years before the rest of us. She was a neat one, she was. And I'm sure still is. When we all drove down to Fargo to visit her new family, her toddler begged us to come look at his room and when we all gathered in his cozy little bedroom he lifted up the skirt on his toddler bed and said, "Wookit how cwean it is." And he swept his hand under the bed like a pro.

The Times article goes on to say, "Contrary to popular belief, messiness is not necessarily a sign of mental disorganization. Who among us doesn't know a messy person who can instantly retrieve, from a bewildering stack of papers, exactly what he's looking for? As Freud supposedly said: ''Don't clean up the mess. I know exactly where everything is.'"

Those productive and happy messy types, the Oscars of the world, don't sweat the details of their made environments. They just sweep the clutter off the coffee table with a free elbow before planting a box of Grandpa Tony's thin crust pizza and a coupla Dad's root beers for the game. The Oscars can torture the Felixes, easily. I could do that to my mom, but that wouldn't be nice for her or me. The Felixes, of course, can torture the Oscars. Once I took my mom to a party in Uptown, to my friend's stylish apartment. When we got back to my place we had to share a queen bed in the one furnished bedroom. We lay down together and said our good nights. She said, "You have nice friends." I said, "Thanks." She said, "You could get your place to look like that, too." Torture.

And we all might know those schizophrenics: the ones who drive cars filled with so much crap you can't move the passenger seat back anymore but who have alphabetized their CD collection and keep matching indexes near the shelf. Or the neat freaks who have one or two really annoying sloppy habits, somehow proving that they are not neurotic, they're not, they're not. Like my old roommate who always made toast on the counter without ever using a plate or a napkin and also refused to rinse out the tub after long shaves in the bath, so that the white tub had a perennial five o'clock shadow.

Anyway, I'll be tempted to post pictures of my clean-a-thon but I promise I won't. In a few days I'll get this house to that good-enough place, good enough for the Feloxcar in me.