Cleaning out drawer conversational clunker

Thirteen years ago, my son and grandson invited me over to eat chili and watch the Dallas Cowboys.

“What did you do today?” my son asked, dicing tomatoes in the guacamole he was making.

“I cleaned out a drawer!” I told him enthusiastically.

My grandson, home from college for the holidays, looked up from stirring the chili.

“Wow, grandma,” he said. “You’re really living on the edge!”

The chili and guacamole were great and it was great to watch Tony Romo and the ‘Boys win a game. But after I got home, I started wondering when cleaning out a drawer was something to, one, be excited about and, second, to talk about.

How come, when asked what I did that day, couldn’t I have reported that I plotted a hike up Mt. Kilimanjaro, built a deck on the back of the house and wrote a fiery but well-reasoned letter of protest to the editor. Of course I didn’t do any of those things but it would have made me sound more like someone you’d choose to have a conversation with and less like the person you’d least like to be trapped in an elevator with. Especially when I asked them what they had been doing and they said packing for a skiing trip they were going on the next morning.

What I was doing the next morning was lying in bed, listening to NPR’s Sunday Edition. The host was interviewing a woman about “the coolest gadgets you’re about to want.” She had just been to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to see the latest in electronic marvels: 3-D TV, e-readers, tablet computers, cars we can talk to, the I-phone, the Google phone.

I felt even more like a creaky, cranky Luddite when I realized not only did I just vaguely understand what any of this stuff was for or how it worked, I didn’t even want any of it. What I wanted at that moment, dull as it sounds, was more drawers cleaned out and organized.

The one I’d done the day before was accidental. I tried to find something in a drawer by my computer and ended up taking out so much stuff, I figured I might as well just dump everything out, knock out the debris on the bottom, throw away most of it and neatly arrange what was left. I found five wooden rulers with a rubber band wrapped around them that I didn’t remember having.

It cheered me up so much that I kept the drawer open the rest of the day just to admire it. I vowed to clean out the other five, one a day for five days. And, in a burst of unrealistic optimism, the nine shelves above the drawers.

What I won’t do is tell anybody. When someone asks me, “What did you do today?” I will resort to the answers my grandson always gave me when I picked him up after school.

“How was school today?” I always asked and he always answered, “Fine.”

“What did you do today?” I’d ask next.

“Nothing,” he always answered.

As I left to go home after the chili and the game, I told them what a fun evening it had been. “And call me if you get bored and need some stimulating conversation before you go skiing,” I offered.

Mary McClure is a former newspaper editor who lives in Lawton.