My messy messy car

My car is a mess again.

I always feel a small sense of defeat when my car gets messy. I know a few people – my parents being the number one example, but now my husband has recently started doing it too – who keep the interiors of their cars in showroom condition 365 days a year: not a tissue or a scrap of paper to be found. Getting into their car is like getting into a rental the moment you’ve been handed the keys: empty and anonymous.

But anonymous in a good way. A clean, well-organized way. A living-lightly-with-little-impact kind of way. Te be able to step out of the car without leaving a trace behind: that, to me, is organized.

What I am right now is disorganized, and my car belies my attempts to be otherwise. On the passenger side floor, my daughter's drawings from last week’s Sunday school session are piled with the reference book for my son’s math curriculum (they gave each parent a copy at Back-to-School Night, so that we could look up any questions we might have while our kids were doing their homework. The only question I have is why he can’t do his own homework by himself.), a copy of Bon Appetit that I’m hoping will inspire me to make some new weekday meals, the warrant from last month’s town meeting, a book that just came in to the library on reserve and that I really hope to start before my time with it expires, and, most discouragingly, six weeks’ worth of New York Times Style sections, New York Times Book Reviews and New York Times Magazines.

It’s the New York Times canon that particularly discourages me, because it reminds me how behind I am on any kind of intellectual growth. In the summer, when the kids do a lot of swimming and playing at the playground, I sit outdoors watching them and reading the New York Times. In the fall, I let it slip, and am surely a less enlightened person for it.

In the very back of the car is my secret pile. As I confessed in a newspaper column several years ago (and quite frankly got taken to task by several preschool teachers in my readership), I transfer a lot of my daughter's art projects from backpack to recycling, never to grace the interior of our house. It’s not that I don’t love her work; it’s just that there’s so much of it. Drawing upon painting upon collage. And almost always, she forgets about them the minute she deposits them into my hands: the joy for her is in the creating, not the creation, a trait which I admire from an Zen perspective even as I take advantage of it mercilessly by disposing of her artwork left and right.

Every now and then, though, she inadvertently calls my bluff. “Mommy, where’s that leaf college I did on the second day of school?” she’ll ask. So I’ve learned to use the back of the car as sort of a holding tank. I pile her work there and hope she doesn’t ask for it; after a month or so, I feel safe putting it in the recycling. And I never have to find a place for it inside the house.

Still, things are getting messy. Once when my son was about six, one of his friends climbed into our car, looked around, and said quite ingenuously and without a trace of sarcasm, “You know, you can clean the inside of your car!” It was as if he was assuring me that the technology existed and I need only avail myself of it, the way you might say to an elderly person, “You know, you can record TV shows that you won’t be home on time to watch!”

He was right, and I’m a slob when it comes to my car, and it’s a subject of ongoing guilt for me. So I’ll try to sort and empty and vacuum the interior sometime this week and make a clean start of it, see how long I can maintain a clutter-free car.

And then maybe after that I’ll wash the outside. At least I can rely on professionals for that. Or, at the very least, the Bedford High School cheerleading squad – they have car washes all the time. And surely they won’t judge me if they glimpse the interior clutter. It soothes me to think maybe their cars are just as bad.