Closet Space

You can never have enough closet space and I can never have enough because I am convinced that when I am away, the cats go fluff my sweaters and shirts, making them take up three times the original amount of shelf space and flowing out onto the floor when I open the closet door.

This is an irrational conviction, I know because in truth the cats merely re-arrange the furniture and order pizza delivery when I am at work.

But something is happening in the closet because I don't remember it being ransacked the last time I left it.

All my closets have one thing in common: No light. Not a shred of visible bandwidth illumination anywhere to be found. You've got to go in with torches and breadcrumbs to stand a hope in hell of coming out in less than three weeks.

The bedroom closet is the worst. It's deep, a walk in. It holds a lot and it is, like the rest of the bedroom, dark as a cave at midnight. Getting ready for work is not a routine, it's an exercise program.

1) Run into closet, feel around for a shirt.
2) Take the shirt into the light. Is it solid color, pinstripe, clean? Remember the shirt.
3) Run back into closet and grope out a pair of pants.
4) Bring them into the light.
5) Mix and match colors, running back in and bringing clothes out until you have a winner.

Now that's not entirely fair. The closet gets some light. In the summer months, I found that a ray of light beams straight into it between 6.24 and 6.27 in the morning. I don't know what happens in winter yet.

The light shines down like some messenger from the heavens. Lights up the whole back of the closet. Shoe rack and all. Reminds me of a scene out of Raiders of the Lost Ark: "Now Indy, quick, pick a matching pattern!"

There's a door in the basement that leads to a closet as well.

At least that's what I tell everyone.

It's easier than the truth.

Which is that it leads to a hot tub.

Oh the shame of it! I live in a house with a built in hot tub in the basement. And this is no luxury spa. No, don't think Blue Lagoon. Think Silence of the Lambs.

The hot tub is a four seater, brown and white stripe monster from the seventies. If you hold your ear to it, you can hear the Bee Gees and gold chains. It's built into its own little room, under the front porch. The room is paneled in some sort of sauna-esque wood, has excruciatingly low ceilings and a wooden floor. It weirds me out and that takes a lot.

Its fucking embarrassing is what it is. "Wanna see my hot tub in the basement?" Yeah, that's going to draw them in, isn't it.

What's more, the place is fairly lousy with hookups of one sort or another. There is one, count it, one electrical outlet in my entire bedroom. ONE!

There are three plus a phone jack in the hot tub room.

A phone jack? This is rural Pennsylvania!

"Amen, call me if the corn futures go verrukt. I'm a-being in the hot tub."

When I was looking at the knob and tube palace with my realtor, we happened across the hot tub room. Judy was a lovely woman who had gotten to know me well at that time. She was a tall, elegant lady who had emigrated from England and still retained most of her cultured way of speaking.

"Well, we certainly know what you're going to do with this, don't we?" she said as we looked the hot tub over.

"What's that?" I asked, wondering if she maybe thought that single life was going to create a Hyde to my then Jeckyll.

"Weeeiiirrrrrughhh!" she said, doing perhaps the most perfect impersonation of a chainsaw I've ever heard a woman, English or otherwise, do.