UNITED STATES—A revised list of essential qualities needed to follow-through on the elimination of a storage locker would include:

–doggedness

–strategy

–ruthlessness

Doggedness needs to be underscored. In our more than half week doing battle against the “small” storage locker, my mother called me a “slave driver.” This was a first, and I don’t deny its accuracy. Before arriving in Watsonville, I approached this as a commitment. We had a plan, “to clear out a locker” that was costing us money, but at every moment our resolution was in peril. The pull to go home, drag ourselves away and enjoy deceptive pleasures and come back another day, was overpowering at times.

The real strategy to triumph over the locker’s contents emerged as we slowly rummaged through the stuff. The strategy came from sizing up the foe and the treacherous lure of getting rooted in place and succumbing to a desire to sift through the stuff, item by item. That would doom us to ineffectual scratching at the surface. Getting sidetracked on the hypnotic pull of the past—that was the thing to vanquish.

After the second day, I started taking boxes quickly as I could to the “large” locker from the “small” and take advantage of all the remaining volume in that longer locker and thus empty the “small” locker. Half hidden in the incredible jumble of stuff, I found a dolly and then got really rolling, moving as many boxes as I could pile on.

Cutting loose of all the sentiment and fascination, I tried to look at the stuff as, no more and no less, than the boxes of popping oil I used to heave from the loading dock to the storage room of the Sunset 5 Theater. Keep it moving, that was the thing. At the end of the afternoon, my mother marveled at the bare walls emerging in one corner and exclaimed,”We’re making headway.”

It made me feel good and a little cleared space could motivate us to keep on—antidote to my mom’s recurring comment, “Do you really think we’re going to get out of here?” It was the next day she got wise that we weren’t cleaning out all that stuff, but I had initiated a steady stream of boxes and bag to the “large” locker, accelerated by the dolly.

There were times my body didn’t want to move, stupefied by some flashback an object had triggered. I was not immune to the sentiment, nostalgia and wonder the accumulation provoked. Just for sheer fun, the time capsules of random stuff scooped off the tables during a Texas-cyclone cleaning circa 1979 had phenomenally more potential meaning than a box of yardage, say. These could yield a funny snapshot or a letter from summer camp. The finding of one orthodontic retainer provoked silliness, and we could use all the silliness we could find in the midst of this dense labor.

Lost treasures? There was one. I found a Rookwood vase that had been absent for years from the phone nook in our house, sure that it had been a casualty of the ’89 quake. But the real treasures were generally of a more personal vein.

There was a piece of garbage I picked up—turned out to be a letter from my Grandma to me, doling out advice in my teen years. “I am sorry to hear you are not a happy soul,” the phase leapt out and now that I have a daughter, who’s almost a teen, Grandma’s message to try to participate in the family, even if it wasn’t “a rose garden,” and enjoy these years at home, profoundly connected and I was moved. But I couldn’t dwell and had to keep moving to finish the job—that was where the ruthlessness came in. Carrying on, pitting our desire to give up against the continued expense of housing this “stuff.”

And there even appeared a stray plastic case for a Krugerrand, the South African gold coin that my dad with a good heart had gifted my mom. It evidences how politically unsophisticated we were, helping to sponsor apartheid; then again, to tame a storage unit means facing warts and pimples of the past. Let’s be brutally honest.

To be continued…

Humorist Grady Miller is the author of “Lighten Up Now: The Grady Diet,” now in paperback on Amazon. He can be reached at grady.miller@canyon-news.com.