Saving

Every other Tuesday the cleaning woman arrives, a young energetic blonde who feels she must "organize" as she cleans, an irritating tendency that I try to defeat by making a stab at arranging the books and clothes, pens and papers in my study/bedroom so that she will see "organization" when it is not actually there.  She is not fooled, but we have made a truce and she will at least not lay a hand nor a dust rag for that matter on my desk and the items strewn across its surface.  The truth of the matter is that I have too many things.  The closet contains eight suit jackets most of which are really too heavy to wear in Florida, although I thought that I had done a great job sorting out my unsuitable outfits when we moved away from New England.  But perhaps the larger question is: why would I need eight at an age, in a climate, and social setting where polo shirts and tee shirts are about all I ever wear?  There is also a rack of cotton pants, kakhi, black, brown--you's think it was a clothing store.  And I thought I had sorted through everything five years when we downsized. Trouble was I was always afraid that I would need some one of these things that I was about to throw away.  Is this what they call "anal retentive"?  I remember learning the phrase at roughly the same time that I married my second wife, whose family was what they call "old money," people who had held on to their assets for more than a century, and, interestingly enough, she herself suffered slightly from constipation, something I always found mildly ironic.  Don't I understand that the contents of my closets and shelves are easily replaced?  I can even walk from here to Macy's in the mall. I remember when I was a boy an anecdote my mother told me which involved being with my father on some trip when weather turned suddenly cold.  "What did you do?" I asked anxiously.  She laughingly replied "Went out and bought some warmer things."  My astonishment, nay, horror, lasted perhaps for the next fifty or so years until I was with my younger daughter in Victoria British Columbia and a spell  of icy winds came upon us, and we were both shivering.  I marched her into a fancy tourist shop which was right there and we bought some marvelously warm, grotesquely ugly, and embarrassingly expensive sweat shirts and gloves, something for the day and already meant for Goodwill.