{"id":445,"date":"2011-05-14T21:09:46","date_gmt":"2011-05-14T21:09:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fanagrams.net\/blog\/?p=445"},"modified":"2011-05-14T21:11:17","modified_gmt":"2011-05-14T21:11:17","slug":"tings-a-koo-moo-late","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/tings-a-koo-moo-late\/","title":{"rendered":"Tings A-Koo-Moo-A-Late"},"content":{"rendered":"

We moved into our current house three years ago, and I exulted in our abundant storage space and expansive counter tops, particularly the kitchen which featured a large island.\u00a0 In our previous house I had railed against the piles of clutter that clogged every available flat surface \u2013 I had thought a possible solution was sloping counters such that everything would roll off, forcing household members to put away or otherwise dispose of clutter.\u00a0 Despite all sorts of empty drawers waiting to be filled with a \u201cdisorderly assemblage\u201d (the dictionary.com definition of clutter), the new counter tops simply exacerbated the problem by attracting even larger volumes of clutter that could loiter around for days.\u00a0 Both Nick and I have home offices, and though I am mostly a solo act, Nick does have clients that stop by time to time.\u00a0 To get to his office above the garage they have to walk through the kitchen and mudroom, which my mother always referred to as clutter-prone \u201ctension zones.\u201d\u00a0 So Nick might call out, \u201cClient arriving in an hour,\u201d and together we would get into our counter attack positions and try and render all flat surfaces visible once again.\u00a0 This generally involves indiscriminately sweeping all the gradoux of the previous week into an empty drawer.<\/p>\n

This reminded me of the \u201ctings akoo-moo-late \u201d drawer in my parent\u2019s household, coined by a wonderful Belgian cleaning lady who used to bring me ceramic figurines and make diminutive cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off.\u00a0 She knew that the cleaning lady was the obvious scapegoat for anything that went missing, so she simply put every \u201cting\u201d into one \u201cakoo-moo-late\u201d drawer in the kitchen.\u00a0 I wallow in jealous awe when I enter a house with immaculate counter tops and no clutter in sight.\u00a0 I don\u2019t consider myself a slob but it seems to takes almost heroic daily efforts to achieve the immaculate counter top.\u00a0 I feel certain that all these households must have cavernous akoo-moo-late drawers someplace.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Occasionally when I am in a new household I like to take a discrete peek into the fridge to get a quick insight into the guts of a family.\u00a0 For example, you could discover that the family was a Miracle Whip family instead of a real mayo family, or that they had some sort of odd food fetish, such as scads of different jars of olives, or that even the tiniest scrap of food was saved in color coded Tupperware containers.\u00a0 I think that a peek into the akoo-moo-late drawer might be just as enlightening.\u00a0 For years there was a fake throw up and whoopee cushion in our drawer, which gives you some insight on the general tenor of the humor in our household.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Once things drifted into the drawer they seemed to acquire a life of their own and were never thrown out.\u00a0 For example, a dented ping pong ball simply cannot be resuscitated and by any reckoning has outlived its usefulness.\u00a0 Basic household etiquette would demand that you pick up the ball, rotate about 180 degrees and deposit it in the garbage can behind you, but in our household this would never happen.\u00a0 Perhaps we secretly wanted to retaliate by inflicting the same initial heady rush of joy at finding the ball followed by swift disappointment at spotting the flaw and cancelling the ping pong game.\u00a0 If directly asked why the ball wasn\u2019t thrown away, we could simply say, \u201cOh I thought someone was saving it for something, like for an art project.\u201d\u00a0 But basically, I think that throwing anything out would violate the unspoken sanctuary of the akoo-moo-late drawer. \u00a0Other items in the drawer might have included: \u00a0<\/p>\n