Image by Fons Heijnsbroek.

I’m planning to put my house on the market, which means I have to empty it out. No big deal, right? Go through the stuff, get rid of most of it. This is necessary, young man, so do it! Instead, here I am, doing the opposite. I’m writing about it, indeed, internally screaming with amazement.

When you’re my age (and no, I’m not actually a young man), cleaning out the house in which I’ve lived for the last forty years means digging through my life, almost all of it, and even more, apparently – e.g., boxes of miscellany rescued from my parents’ house decades ago, then stashed away and forgotten. But now it’s all cascading back to me – recent memories, old memories, and lots and lots of: “Huh? What the hell is this?”

This is an old man’s treasure hunt, which complicates the actual task of emptying the house and getting it ready to be sold. The problem for me is how easily I get lost in the treasure trove of whatever – how easily I lose a sense of the task at hand and simply focus my attention on what I’m finding . . . not only ogling it but analyzing it, absorbing it, getting lost in it. This is not an abstract process – not for me it isn’t, especially considering that, because I’m a lifelong writer, I’m coming upon lots and lots and lots of forgotten work, going back multiple decades: essays, journalism, fiction, poetry, classroom assignments, unfinished novels. The temptation to start reading........

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