By Pennie Azarcon Dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

FOR the longest time, the concept of living in absolutely made no sense to me. As guys crudely put it, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Yup, I thought smugly; living-in is for women so desperate to snag a mate they’d willingly give away samples of the goods to entice potential takers.

Until I got married.

Getting hitched is when you realize that you never really get to know someone until you’re actually living together. Eight years of dating, dining, and whining didn’t prepare me for my partner’s inner life and darkest secret. Nope, he’s not with the mob. Neither is he a cross-dresser, a werewolf, or a fan of Willie Revillame. A perfectly decent guy, he is also, to my horrified surprise, a pack rat.

Nothing ever gets thrown out. Not the old turntable missing its arm, not the chest of drawers that was falling apart, not the moth-eaten shirts already outgrown, stained or faded. Not the balding car wheels that we’ve replaced months back and which were probably breeding dengue mosquitoes. Not the rusty filing cabinet whose contents nobody was brave enough to examine, since it had once sat on fetid floodwaters for a week. For the longest time, it sat desolate in the backyard along with the car wheels and the turntable. In the library, occupying three glass-enclosed shelves, is a pile of 1950s book-bound Readers Digest that plays host to a whole colony of termites.

Nope, the resident pack rat (RPR) once declared, we’re not junking the 50-year-old solihiya bed given his parents on their wedding night. For some ten years, RPR would have the sagging solihiya rewoven into a firm staging pad for the lumpy mattress, spending what could probably buy us a sumptuous opium bed. Recurrent back pains finally convinced him to let go, but not before he extracted a promise that I wouldn’t dump the old thing. So there it was — leaning against the wall with no takers because not even the househelp could be coaxed, strong-armed and bribed into allowing it into their room. Months later, when we had the house repaired, he suddenly had a brainwave. So now the solihiya stands grandly in our cramped sala, converted into a makeshift divider separating the phone from the TV watching area. Cleeever, guests would gush, to the Cheshire cat grin of RPR.

Thus encouraged, he has since lovingly sealed in saran wrap his latest trove of rare books that, he tells me, would be worth a fortune some hundred years from now. A hundred years from now, I tell him wryly, we’d be pushing daisies. That’s why we go to the gym, RPR counters. “So we can live to be a hundred plus by which time we’d be rich, rich, RICH!!! Bwaaaahaaaaahaaaa!!!” Unable to match that diabolical laughter, I’ve since resolved to quietly get rid of as much junk as I can, donating outmoded shirts to fire victims who come a-begging for old clothes, making dishtowels of the stained camisa chino and pajamas, selling the car wheels to the itinerant junkman, donating old books to public libraries and orphanages, and so on.

Not that I’m OC when it comes to tidying up. I remember once tacking a sign over my work station that read, “A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind,” to ward off remarks about my messy table. I’ve been known to hold on to clutter for a good two or three years until rats found my stash and shredded them or, later in my married years, until the termites made a feast of it.

Still, I have my limits. When the pile of books and assorted papers start moving on their own, like the glob of jello in “Jurassic Park,” I start weeding out. When the leftovers in the ref take on the countenance of alien forms, I cheerfully sweep them into the trash. And once, when I found roaches (God, I hate them!) crawling between pages of my never-finished novel, I decided I’d rather be tidy than famous.

So whatever happened to that frugal, parsimonious and prudent homemaker who would keep and reuse disposable party cups from children’s parties to save a few pesos? Not to mention convert old bed sheets into curtains, tatty socks into dusting bunnies and last year’s calendar pages into telephone memo pads?

Alright, alright, I confess: it all has to do with age. Having senior moments every few minutes can be very persuasive. You misplace your glasses and find yourself hauling out an entire drawer whose contents, to your horror, fills up the entire kitchen. You know you kept the keys to the safety deposit box in your closet, but discover that the tons of outdated clothes you’ve kept for charity have eaten them up. And where, oh where, in this plethora of unlabelled boxes, did you slip in the guide to last year’s Christmas gifts so you don’t wind up giving the same stuff to friends and relatives?

So now I adhere to my two-year rule: anything that doesn’t get used within two years gets discarded, recycled, donated or, oh well, slipped into the plethora of heretofore unlabelled boxes — to be sorted out later. So sue me; old habits die hard. Or it could RPR’s dusty habit rubbing off on me. Didn’t they say that married couples eventually get to resemble each other? Eeeeewwww, hand me that trash bag!

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For recycling tips and how to de-clutter the world, check out the Oct. 19 issue of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine. Free with your copy of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.