Renewal

 The philosopher George Carlin once suggested that one man's junk is another man's stuff. Specifically, your stuff is stuff while another person's stuff is junk. This makes it all the more interesting to me that every person I know has in their home what they will themselves refer to as "a junk drawer." 

There's lots of stuff in a junk drawer. 

A roll of tape. 

Batteries of various sizes and charges.

Bits of string. 

Tools living outside the relative convenience of a tool box. 

And so on. 

It is where useful things go to die. How about that spent tube of super glue? When it landed in the drawer it probably had one more application, but since super glue isn't your every day glue, it goes where all once useful things go: The Junk Drawer. 

That's just one of the things I found when I went on a mission to clean and reorganize our junk drawer. Mixed in with all those previously mentioned dead batteries and random nails and screws was that little vial of crusty chemicals that might once have been used to mend a broken plate or watch band. There were a few brand new watch batteries left on a package that once held half a dozen, with the immediacy of needing just that one every year or two left them buried under earthquake wax and cords for blinds that we got rid of decades ago. There was a padlock whose combination is now the stuff of legend. Perhaps those ancient numbers will reveal themselves to one of us in a dream about our junior high school locker. 

But not today. 

Today was the day that I ruthlessly tore into the notion that we might need this or that "someday." Today was the day that all of that wishful thinking went out the window, along with the shards of a broken protractor and a pair of dual phone jack splitters. 

Junk. 

I kept the stuff. You never know when you'll need that tiny solar powered calculator.