For mostly happy reasons, I have spent the past 10 years moving into smaller and smaller living quarters. When I tell people this, they either look at me sadly and think Poor guy is going through some bad stuff, or they brighten and loudly say something like, That’s so great! I wish I could do that!
The truth is, as my life changed, both vocationally and geographically, I didn’t need as much room as I had when I lived in Los Angeles. Southern California is a place that’s mostly about space and sunlight. But it’s also about spending hours in the car creeping along in traffic, so by the time you get home, you’re really ready to spread out. California houses have lots of big, empty spaces and outside spaces to let the light in. In Los Angeles, people head over to Costco in their giant SUVs and load up with everything, confident that it’ll all fit somewhere. California houses have plenty of closet space — it helps that there aren’t a lot of heavy coats fighting for space — though, because the California uniform is mostly T-shirts, there’s plenty of rack space to spare.
But then I moved to Manhattan, where space and light are things that you buy with money — lots and lots of it — and even the rich people I know have trouble stacking the sweaters and T-shirts in their closets. When I finally sold my house in Los Angeles and moved permanently to Manhattan, it was like trying to squeeze into a pair of pants you wore many decades and a thousand pints of ice cream ago.
And then I moved into an even smaller place, close to the Princeton Theological Seminary, where I am currently a student, and the quarters have become even tighter. In 10 years or so, I have crammed my possessions — clothes, books, furniture, art, everything — into smaller and smaller spaces until the walls seem to groan like someone who has eaten too much at dinner and has to lie down. It’s as if I’m waiting for the place itself to digest the things I can’t bring myself to get rid of.
That’s not, as you might imagine, a good strategy for downsizing, and I am ashamed to say I have become one of those self-storage people. In some drab and vaguely depressing compound nearby, I have rented a medium-sized box with a roll-down door and filled it with stuff I don’t need.
Or, stuff I may not need. The point is, I don’t know if I need it or not — do I need hard copies of my old scripts and book manuscripts? Do I need Christmas ornaments? Travel photographs from 1993? Letters and cards piled into a plastic tub labeled, pretentiously, Archives 1990-2010? A fan? Four umbrellas? A stand-up desk I bought from an Instagram account a few years ago? VHS tapes of television shows I wrote and produced?
There’s a lot of junk in that storage unit, I know, and even though I promised myself I would never be one of those people, boy, am I ever one of those people. That’s sort of the problem, I think, with promising yourself you’ll never do a certain thing or be a certain way. You almost always end up exactly where you said you’d never be.
THE COURAGEOUS HONESTY OF CHARITABLE GIVING
Here’s what isn’t in that storage unit: books. Books, for some reason, I need to keep close by. Books are stacked in piles under things, on the surface of every table, along the shelves that line the bedroom and the living room. Books, for some reason, I don’t feel guilty about keeping around.
Which isn’t to say I haven’t gotten rid of a ton of books in the two cram-down events of my recent past. I gave boxes away, sold off some others, and passed some specific titles to people in my life I knew would or should enjoy them. Books, for some reason, inspire in me a deep, but unsentimental, attachment. I want certain of them around, and I’m fine getting rid of the others. Also, in a pinch, they can prop up a table leg or get stacked into end tables. But there’s no way I’m going to rent a storage unit and stick books in it. Trust me: I’m never going to be one of those people.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
