The Quicker Picker-Upper

Since its first television commercial in 1967, Procter & Gamble’s Bounty Paper Towels have claimed to be the “quicker picker upper.”  P&G is wrong. 

I am the quicker picker upper. 

Now, honesty compels me to point out that the most recent ads assert that Bounty Paper Towels are the “thicker, quilted, quicker picker upper,” and I can make no pretension to being either thicker or quilted.  Still, I am the quicker picker upper.  I ply my picker upperism relentlessly in my classrooms.  Not the smallest chad from the edge of a page torn from a student’s spiral binder flutters to the floor before I have tweezed it between thumb and forefinger and deposited in the waste can.  Not the most forlorn penny lying on a classroom floor escapes my apprehension (provided, of course, that it is heads up), not a wadded gum or candy bar wrapper, not a drained plastic bottle or can of some beverage or other (AMP, Red Bull and Five Hour Energy are popular), not a well-chewed pencil, not a tracked in leaf, no detritus or debris or rubbish of any kind eludes my seizure.  

My penchant for picker uppery extends to my office as well, but it is at home that it unfolds its wings most (in)gloriously. Active grandchildren and their friends tornado through the house, pillaging pantry and cupboard, ransacking the refrigerator, and having descended like raiding Visigoths, leave in their wake juice cartons and Dorito chips and Gatorade bottles and half-eaten apples and stray shoes and strewn socks and discarded and abandoned-in-place items of clothing and bottle caps that missed their waste-basket mark and scattered magazines, books, plates, silverware, glasses, food particles of various sizes and states of freshness, and sundry other riff-raff and rejectamenta, the unstowed, the unstored, the unput-away.  I pluck and gather, pince and forcep. St. Peter was a fisher of men; I am a fisher of the spread and shed, the dropped and slopped, the cast off, cast down, cast away.  By vocation, I am a member of the literati; by avocation, it seems, I am a conscript in the brigade of litterati.

This picker uppish passion is undoubtedly connected to my propensity to neaten, order, and arrange.  My colleagues have commented more than once upon the trim organization of my desk.  My wife Kathy has commented more than once, in decidedly dubious terms, about my habit of stacking coins on my dresser: quarters, dimes, and nickles, each sprucely columned, pennies in a cleaned-out candle jar.  The American literature section on my bookshelf is aligned historically, from the Puritans to Alexie, Robinson, and Morrison.  I prepare lunch at the same time I make breakfast because I eat the same thing at both:  proteinized and fiberized oatmeal topped with the contents of three packets of Truvia and a dollop of blackberry jam.  For dinner I rotate through the same three meals. Every morning I treadmill for exactly 60 minutes at precisely 2.8 miles per hour, increasing the gradient every ten minutes. Every morning I make the bed, pestering the sheets and blanket into unwrinkled compliance.  I chronically straighten throw rugs, return chairs to their prim position under the table, and wash dishes.  Undoubtedly, to the casual onlooker, my symmetry would seem fearful, indeed.  Were cleanliness really next to godliness, I would be well on my way to canonization.

My disposition to fix, place, align, and configure is a lonely office, but, strange to say, Mr. Clean is not my hero (he’s always seemed distinctly piratical to me), I do not haunt the cleaning products aisles, nor am I some puritanical greenie who considers the use of more than five sheets of toilet paper an ethical violation of the highest order.  How, then, did I acquire this disposition to dispose so systematically?  I don’t believe it was my upbringing.  Mom was a dutiful housekeeper, but she did not aspire to pristine, Ladies Home Journaled dustlessness.  Dad had a fastidious side, but, typical of his generation, only about his tools, his lawn, and his vehicles.  I share his tool care and cleaning pickiness, but my lawn languishes and my mud-splashed, bug-splattered truck goes unwashed.

I present none of the symptoms or allied behaviors of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: I experience no panic attacks or stress, am not continually beset by thoughts of neatening, am able to function socially and occupationally, exhibit no hair pulling or Tourett’s disorder or anorexia or depression or, to the best of my knowledge, brain chemical imbalances.  Nor, I am certain, do I suffer from an anal retentive personality:  Mom told me I was a “breeze” to toilet train, and she and Dad heaped praise upon me when, as Dad put it, I “did my business.”  It is unlikely that one of the six innate, universal moral principles theorized by Jonathan Haidt—purity/degradation—is particularly pronounced in me, and that my picker upperosity is an effort to avoid contamination and elevate myself to a nobler, more exalted level.  In fact, I’ve always found the fussy rectitude of Thoreau’s assertion that our carnal lives are a “disgrace” and a “cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which [we] are allied” a pulpiteering exercise in Calvinistic self-renunciation, too much along the lines of the Puritan minister Edward Taylor calling himself a “varnished pot of putrid excrements.”  Charming!  So much for the tanginess of experience.

So, if my picker upperist and neatest predilections are instilled by neither external nor internal influences, if they are not compensatory gestures to overcome what Abraham Maslow calls “deficiency needs,”  how, then, were they kindled?  Why their impulsive blossom?  I am tempted to ascribe them to the poet Robert Southey’s description of order as “the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state;” however, I think that lofty sentiment both overstates and understates my habits.  I pick up and neaten because they are convenient and self-satisfying activities.  They save time, they save effort, and they are pleasing.  Why do I stack coins?  So I can quickly grab the amount I want to take with me on that particular day.  Why do I eat oatmeal for breakfast and lunch?  Because it’s nutritious, filling, and, most importantly, I like it.  Why do I treadmill every morning?  Because it makes me feel good, and it affords me an opportunity to read.  Why do I prepare the lunch oatmeal at breakfast?  Because I come home for lunch and am pressed for time.  Why is my bookshelf’s American literature section arranged historically?  Because I consult it often and it makes finding the text I want easier.  Why do I pick up and neaten?  Because it feels right, feels good, that the spaces I move in most frequently balance comfort and safety and hygiene and presentability.  Do I care if it all seems abnormal?  Not at all, for as Laura Kipnis says, “the concept of normalcy . . .is one of the more powerful social management tools devised to date.”  Is it possible that my picker uppery and neatenry are forms of sidling up to the border of nonconformism, acts of stealth rebellion?

Still, I am no stalwart Leonides defending the Thermopylaen pass of inflexible routine.  As it happens, I agree wholeheartedly, wholesouledly, with novelist Tom Robbins: “True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.”   I know that only as things are unsettled, only as commotion convulses and welter whirls, only as answers play hide and seek with questions, does creativity stir.  I seek balance.  I make room for novelties, try the untried, experiment, sometime vary simply for the purpose of varying—though I worry that this, too, has become part of my routine.