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Buried treasure

That plastic Askansas hog hat down in the basement could be an heirloom one day.

We've been talking since the summer now, my wife and I, about how we're going to clean house now that our sons are both in collegiate day care. Long overdue, we tell each other. Good God, there's stuff down cellar from 1981. It's embarrassing to have the meter reader in, there's so much stuff to trip over.

No need to do it all in one weekend, of course. We'll chip away at this Everest of detritus, one vanload at a time. We'll start with that ziggurat of empty boxes from Filene's, Adidas, and the Gap. Then, we'll wade through the youth lacrosse sticks, the preschool books, the Nerf archery set, and the incomplete Pachinko game.

Naturally, Halloween came and went and we hadn't touched a thing. Even the huge plastic jack-o'-lanterns the boys once used for trick-or-treating were still there. Was it a simple matter of procrastination? Or the usual tug of war between the minimalist and the pack rat?

I'm the minimalist. I take one bag with me anywhere I go in the world. One bag to New York, one bag to Tokyo. I don't wear socks unless I'm up near the Arctic Circle. I toss out all my notebooks after a year.

My wife is the pack rat. We've had brim-filled Hefty trash bags outside each son's room for months now, on the off chance that they might have thrown away a deposit slip that will knock their bank balances kablooie. We still have last year's college schedule, the high-school emergency numbers, and the Glorious Garbage Gardens flyer from two years ago posted on the refrigerator door. We have cans of chestnut puree we bought in France in 1986.

We still have National Geographics from 1980, just in case they're needed for a middle-school project. We don't dare throw anything out.

Then again, maybe I'm the pack rat. I wrote a column almost five years ago, admitting sheepishly that I had a 1985 bottle of orange wine from Port Sulphur, Louisiana, a typewritten statement from one of the Manson girls (Squeaky, if you must know), George Carlin's home phone number, and a congratulatory letter from Richard Nixon, asking after my parents. I still have them. My wife still has Nancy Sinatra Sands's spaghetti sauce recipe. We can't tell if we're supposed to use rosemary or not. The handwriting is blurred.

Something more than procrastination is at work here, I think. It may not be as much a matter of clutter as it is a matter of archives. Should we toss out The Amazing Dr. Nin game, the Mr. Potato Head Family, the plastic kicking tee? What if the grandchildren should want them?

A decade ago, we needed to get rid of stuff because there was always more stuff coming in. More books, more video systems, more soccer cleats and baseball gloves. Now, nothing is coming in. Our sons' rooms are frozen in time, almost enchanted. One went dormant in 1995, the other this past summer.

We are curators now, my wife and I, and we have to be careful what we discard. Certain items, like the older son's varsity football jersey and the scorebooks from the younger son's Little League games, are must-keeps. But what if the Colecovision video system becomes an eBay collector's item sometime in the next millennium? What if that plastic Arkansas hog hat we abandon blithely in the leave/take corner of the town dump is the boys' idea of an heirloom?

There are women of my mother's generation, after all, who will burn in hell because they chucked out a mint-condition Carl Yastrzemski rookie card. We're not dealing with a fire-hazard cellar anymore. It's a fin de millennium cache. So we're leaving things undisturbed for the time being. Not out of lassitude, but out of fiduciary obligation. Who can say? That bottle of orange wine might be worth a jeroboam of Dom Perignon someday.