The whole blah blah story.
Well, some of it.
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I’m one of those people who crave order. It started in my childhood, as most things do, probably spurred on by the fact that my mother had six kids in 10 years and absolutely no skills in the tidy up arena. Every day at 5:00 my mother would look at the clock and shriek "Bloody hell it’s 5:00 your father will be here any minute" and start barking orders and flying around and generally wreaking havoc left and right. Then she’d go in and throw some potatoes in a pot and burn some stuff in a pan so dinner would be ready when my dad came home. That’s how it was in the 60s in my house.
Then, when I was about 9, I met Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is the main character in a chapter book I found at the library. She was pleasantly plump and always jovial: the kind of woman who baked cookies for the neighborhood children. The kind who knew magic. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle lived alone in an upside down house, with hidden treasure that her dead husband had buried in some yet undiscovered spot in the backyard. (Mr. Piggle-Wiggle had been a pirate.) I remember being mesmerized by the idea of an upside down house. Just think, to get through a doorway you'd have to step up and over. The light fixture would be on the floor. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle had her dead husband’s chest of magical spells, left over from his pirating days no doubt, and she used these spells to cure the bad habits that seemed to afflict the neighborhood kids in epic proportion. Her magic included the Interrupting Cure, The Never-Want-To-Go-To-Bed Cure, and the one sorely needed around my house, the Won't-Pick-Up-Toys Cure. I was hooked from the first chapter. I mean, of course. 
Fun for me as a kid was an afternoon cleaning my room and changing my furniture around. No, I don’t want to play kickball today I want to finish arranging my books by topic. Then by height. Then by color. None of my siblings appeared to have the same calling. No one else, except my father—-who didn’t count because he got upset over everything—-was bothered by the disorder that permeated our lives. The older I got, the more I couldn’t stand the messes outside my bedroom sanctuary. As no one else in my family seemed up to the task of clearing the clutter that was our home, I knew it would have to be me. It was Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle who introduced me to the concept of using games to turn chores into fun. I thought and thought about this and finally came up with a game of my own.
“Who wants to play a game I invented?” I asked my sibs one day, probably a bit too cheerily. My brothers barely stopped playing with their GI Joes. “Not me,” Tommy said. "We’re playing,” Aron added. “It’s a fun game,” I persisted. I was nothing if not persistent. My sister Janie was sitting cross-legged among a mess of sheets and blankets and was washing—-yet again—-the tangled mane of her favorite Barbie. She had a spray-bottle of dishwashing liquid and water, a comb far too big, and a can of my mother’s hairspray. Barbie’s hair would never lay sleek and flat again. Janie cocked her head, eying me suspiciously. “What kind of game?” “I call it the Alphabet Game!” I said, inventing the name right then and there, sure that it would generate excitement. Who doesn't like the alphabet? The boys snorted. Janie went back to ripping Barbie’s snarls. “Well, it’s sort of a cross between an alphabet game and a cleaning-up game.” Who doesn't like cleaning-up games? Tommy interrupted. “That’s just retarded.” (Sadly, we used that word in those days. I'm just being real here.) “A cleaning up game?” said Janie. “No way.” And she grabbed her dolls and scurried out the room-—worried that I might evoke big sister privileges and force her to play. 
Undaunted, I tore downstairs to play it by myself. The Alphabet Game is easy. You start by gathering everything into a heap. It's the same declutter and organize tactic I use today. Armed with the tall brown metal Fuller Brush mop, I attacked the dining room, which was also our playroom. Using wide sweeping shoves I pushed the massive assortment of kid stuff into a pile. It was huge. Books, socks, trash, dishes, toys, towels, brown shrunken apple cores, clothes. It looked like a landfill. Then came the highlight of the festivities: putting everything away.
“I’m getting ready to do the fun part,” I called upstairs. “You sure you guys don’t want to play?” Silence. I began. I started with the letter A, scavenging through the pile to unearth apples, aluminum foil and—-well that was about it. There aren't many things beginning with A. B more than made up for it though because we were all avid readers: The Hardy Boys, Hop on Pop, The World Book Encyclopedias—-no matter what the title, they were in the books category. My own books, of course, were nowhere near this mess. They were up in my tidy room. Neatly arranged on my tidy shelf. B also included beads, baby bottles, banana peels, boats, and boxes, which my youngest brother used to build towers taller than he was. On through the alphabet I charged, bustling to and fro, putting everything in its place and pretending an unseen clock was calculating my time. According to one of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s games, I would be turned into a witch if I didn’t beat the clock, and a beautiful princess with long golden hair if I did. Long golden hair, parted in the middle, was my goal in life. My mother always made me get pixie cuts: short and utilitarian, brown and boring. I sighed after Marcia Brady, Julie on The Mod Squad and Laura Partridge. My sisters and I draped towels around our heads, pretending we had long flowing hair and flipping it first off one shoulder then the other, with a casual toss we’d learned on TV.
As nothing in my house had a set place, I gave myself the job of deciding where things belonged. I was heady with the power. The biggest toys, like Tonka trucks, I tossed into the green wooden bench my father had built. It had orange and brown vinyl cloth nailed onto the top with broad-head upholstery tacks. Three kids sat on this during meals. The other three sat on its twin on the other side of the table.
Dolls and doll parts, I decided after heavy consideration, needed their own home. They would get maimed under the trucks. I perched the dolls on a shelf next to the black rotary wall phone: a naked Ken with washer board abs but nary a hint of genitalia, an armless Betsy Wetsy, and a Chatty Cathy with hair standing on end because Janie washed the living daylights out of the hair of every doll she ever owned. I stood back to admire my display. It looked like a doll infirmary, an insane asylum. But the dolls seemed happy enough: bright-eyed and smiling broadly, they appeared unconcerned about their various handicaps, missing limbs, and states of dishabille. I cleared the bottom shelf of the bookcase for kids’ books. Now they belonged here. When I got to C, I took an armful of cups to the kitchen, where it was hard not to get sidetracked. The kitchen was tiny and inefficient, not meant to serve the needs of a family of eight. Every scrap of surface was stacked with dirty dishes and food in various stages of decay congealed on plates, stuck fast to pots and pans, clogged the drain in the sink. I couldn’t help but get involved. I rinsed the sink and put a load of cups in soak. Cups went first, then plates and bowls, then pots and pans. I had a system down pat at a very early age.
There were some sticky moments in that first alphabet game because monumental decisions had to be made. Was a shirt C for clothes, S for shirt, or T for top? I tried not to get hung up on stuff like that, but rules had to be made or chaos would reign. I decided a shirt was S no matter if it was a blouse or a top, unless it was an undershirt, which was a U, as I hardly ever had Us and had to grab them where I could. Jeans were J, shorts were S and all other types of pants were P. Once I made a rule I stuck with it. Life, I had realized, was much easier when you knew the rules.
Eventually, the massive pile was gone. The empty floor gleamed. I basked in the tidiness of it all, sighing in pleasure at my accomplishment. Then Tommy came down. He stopped short and looked around. I waited, trying to look casual. Maybe he’d say something about my work. He looked under the table. “Where’s my book?” he asked, irritated. I pointed proudly to my new Kids Section bookshelf. “What’d you go and put it there for?” he barked. “I left it under the table on purpose. You leave my stuff alone.” On his way out Tommy bumped into me, accidentally-on-purpose, but I let it go. It had been a successful afternoon. I had earned long golden hair. A star is born. 
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