CLEANING THE AUGEAN STABLE
Three days to go before I get on the plane to Paris and I suddenly had a great realization. For months since coming back from Greece and Germany I have woken up in the morning with nothing that I had to do and waltzed through the day, writing here, reading the news, sometimes going out to eat, reading books.
And then yesterday it dawned on me that going to Paris was not simply a change in mindset, I had to get ready. And that is when I rediscovered my Augean Stable. Cleaning the actual Augean stable housing 3000 cattle, not cleaned in 30 years, was one of the tasks Heracles was assigned for something stupid he had done. He did it by diverting two rivers and hosing it out.
My Augean stable is a little different, it is the Augean stable of most Americans, a life time of collecting stuff and storing it here, there and everywhere. And then at the end of your life realizing either you or someone else was going to have to clear everything out. With this came the realization that I didn’t really want most of these things any more but didn’t know what to do with them.
But I lived quite comfortably in my stable, actually keeping it fairly neat, until it was time to leave. And at this point, as happens again with most everyone going on the trip, there are all kinds of undone things that leaving forces you to do, bills to be paid, people to contact. Kathe spent the week before leaving cleaning the house and left exhausted, even though we had happily lived in it just as it was for months before. If I weren’t leaving none of these things would bother me, I would continue to put them off. It suddenly was very clear that I had just had four months in which I could have done all these things. It was obvious they were going to have to be done sometime. So drew myself together and I faced them head on, briefly.
I have thousands of books that have to go somewhere, clothing of every size, most not worn for years, fills my closet, when looking for a single cable to connect a hard drive need for the trip I found boxes of tangled cables for out of date equipment among jumbled electronic stuff but not the cable that I was looking for, the Apple Pencil that I want to take with me has disappeared, suddenly I was knee deep in my Augean Stable with no river to flush things away.
So this afternoon I started working on my stable. I made a list of my passwords in case I slip on the stairs in Montmartre and don’t come back. But to leave them I had to print them. So I tried to get the printer to work again after having had trouble connecting with it for the past few years, but each time finally getting it going again. This time it was dead, Error OX F1. It sent me to the Epson Website which offered no help, but did feature all kinds of marvelous printers. So I gave up and went to Office Depot where the only available printer was three feet by three feet by three feet. There was a whole shelf of little right size but beat up printers which looked as if they had just come from a thrift shop, store display models. It was the pandemic, the guy said, everyone working at home and no printers coming from overseas. All they had was beat up floor models and one disgruntled customer after another.
And suddenly the stable began to slip away. I could leave the printer until summer. I could leave the closets and books and boxes of memorabilia and dozens of portable hard drives and boxes of photographs to be sorted and all of the things that I have to clear out before I die and get on the plane with the small personal bag and small carry on bag, all that I really need in the world and leave everything behind. I drove home relaxed.
When I walk out of Hotel Tim in three days my steps will be light and I won’t have a care in the world. I will have forgotten my Augean stable completely. And when I come back I will have months and months to think about doing something about it, no rush. The best way to flush out an Augean stable is to get on the plane and go to Paris.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 