Donald Trump’s bathroom, because I’m not willing to share a look into my garage.
I will confess that I have not read the federal indictment, released last week, that accuses former President Trump of the improper possession and hiding of classified documents. But like many other people, I suspect, I did see the widely disseminated photos of heaps of banker’s boxes piled in various rooms in the Mar-a-Lago. The one that hit closest to home, in its poignant suggestion of the sort of where-the-hell-are-we-going-to-put-this-stuff scrambling that probably everyone who has ever moved residences has experienced, was the photo of document boxes stacked in a bathroom, blocking access to the tub and shower. The toilet, it appeared, could still be used, although the fit would be tight.
For someone who has believed all along that Trump from the get-go lacked what should be listed as the minimum qualifications for the nation’s highest office (“candidates must show evidence of previous respect for democratic processes and adherence to the rule of law”), it was hard to look at this photograph without a certain schadenfreude, a word that in my circles has gotten quite a workout in recent years. Had it really come to this, that souvenirs from the world’s most prominent job would be stored in run-of-the-mill cardboard boxes, underneath a chintzy-looking chandelier that in combination with the elaborate rococo-framed mirror, gilt faucet, and swoopily designed vanity made this water closet look like it had been furnished through a single ill-considered Wayfair order? And then there’s that revealing marker scrawl on one box: “MAL Bedroom,” evocative because of its suggestion that the box was not in fact in its intended destination. Perhaps the bedroom had run out of room? And what sort of presidential documents could be imagined as lending themselves to a final destination in a bedroom, anyway?
Schadenfreude, of course, arises most readily when the target is broad, and it’s hard to imagine a more inviting target for cheerful partisan glee than this sort of line of attack, combining as it does some inkling of the frequent mundaneness of the presidency (damn, that’s a lot of paperwork) with the scatological mundaneness of the setting (guess even the most powerful have to take a crap now and again). But I have to confess to another, more sobering reaction. Namely: holy shit, I am glad the national media does not get to publish photos of what the inside of my garage looks like.
I have been acutely aware of this reaction because a pressing need to replace the roof on our old, freestanding garage prompted me to spend much more time than usual inside this little building which, let’s just say, had not been the subject of thorough cleaning or organizing for a long time. Years ago I built shelves in the garage, and bought for it a sturdy, giant workbench from the university surplus property sale, with ideals of having that become the centerpiece of a practical home workshop. But over the years every flat surface, from floor to rafters, had become unworkably crowded with detritus of all sorts. So in recent works I have spent more time than I am comfortable admitting cataloging what’s in our own motley collection of scrounged-together cartons, the antiquity of some of which forms its own sort of trip down memory lane.
I should probably point out, here, that none of my boxes contain national security secrets. In fact, some of them contain, or contained, nothing at all. Like: the giant boxes that once held giant speakers that I bought back in the early 1980s, when the size of audio components was directly correlated with perceived quality, much as was the case with hairstyles. The speakers gave up the ghost years ago and ended up on the curb, but the boxes were still there, up in the rafters. Into the recycling bin.
That was easy. But what to do with the not-so-empty boxes has been a bigger challenge. Like: boxes full of tools inherited from now-gone parents. Packed-up toys and children’s books from when our now-teenager was a toddler. A whole bunch of black-and-white photos I processed back when I was in high school and experimenting with photography. A collection of magazines from my early days as a journalist in Chicago. Papers I wrote in college.
I tried reading a bit of Marie Kondo for inspiration: “Keep only those things that speak to your heart,” she writes in her bestselling book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. “Then take the plunge and discard all the rest. By doing this, you can reset your life and embark on a new lifestyle.” It sounded so simple! But what did speak to my heart? And was it really true that discarding the college papers I wrote on N. Scott Momaday and William Butler Yeats (warning: literature major at work!) had the power to reset my life? What if I’d want to look at them again in another ten years? What if I needed them for inspiration for a future column on writing at different stages of life? And what was I supposed to do with Kondo’s contention that “the question of what you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life”? Thanks, Marie—way to raise the stakes! I was not just trying to clear out some space in the garage—I was articulating a statement about how to live. Which, guess what, made it that much harder to make those repeated decisions about what to keep and what to discard.
For Donald Trump, reliving past glories and fighting on legal and political fronts, perhaps it would be productive to read Kondo’s book. Maybe he’d benefit from her claim that “when we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future.” But as is always the case with questions “of how you want to live your life,” it is far easier to give advice to others than to productively provide it for oneself.
It would be tidy and satisfying to come to some grand conclusion here, just as it would be nice if my garage were, after a lot of dusty cleanup, a newly pristine chamber into which I could go and on demand put my hands on exactly the tool or piece of paper I’m looking for, or even take up the craft of fine woodworking. But it is not. For now it remains an in-between space, still stacked with more evocative stuff than I’d like, a “rag and bone shop of the heart,” as Yeats phrased it many years ago in his poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” It’s a mainstay of college English classes. Guess where I looked that up?
Photo: The bathroom image (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/opinion/trump-indicted-jack-smith.html)
Caption: Donald Trump’s bathroom, because I’m not willing to share a look into my garage.
