{"id":31952,"date":"2020-12-02T13:23:57","date_gmt":"2020-12-02T18:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=31952"},"modified":"2020-12-02T14:16:13","modified_gmt":"2020-12-02T19:16:13","slug":"31952","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=31952","title":{"rendered":"An uncluttered life is a dull life &#8211; That&#8217;s how I roll"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have been organizing fifty years of clutter. I am doing it with the intention of reviewing it for future writing projects. Its a work I&#8217;ve planned to attend to for thirty years. It may be one of the rare an unexpected blessings of a massive Earth threatening pandemic.<\/p>\n<p>All that organizing, and running for Congress and studying French for three hours a day have cut into my writing. It has also served to build up some serious steam in my pour little head that always sleeps better though nights that I have emptied it onto the blog.<\/p>\n<p>Not a day goes by that I don&#8217;t have earth shaking revelations to share&#8230;&#8230;.and yet I have been keeping them mostly to myself for six months.<\/p>\n<p>All my work helps me put things into perspective. For instance I&#8217;ve been wanting to write about my Grandfather for years. I only knew him from a distance as a kid for about a decade most of which I lived five hundred miles away. I saw him only for a couple hours or days every year for most of that time. I have been catching up with him for the last thirty years.<\/p>\n<p>As for my Dad I knew him for about 30 years. He died at age 62 and my first memory of him was his teaching me to count to 100 as I was about to begin first grade. He was 25 when I was born. Subtract the first five years and I knew him for thirty. Until I was married that was every day except for a summer when I interned for our Congressman in Washington D.C. <\/p>\n<p>It was a bit of a shock to me this morning to realize I have known my Father-in-law for considerably longer if not quite so intimately. Claude Scott died a year ago yesterday. I think I first met him the day of my wedding rehearsal when I botched my family introductions at the Congregational Church and put the wrong connections to Claudia&#8217;s family as I introduced them to mine. A sign of things to come??????<\/p>\n<p>That was 1974. I&#8217;ve known Claude Scott for 45 years&#8230;&#8230;fifteen years longer than my Father. Early in my marriage I decided to call him &#8220;Dad&#8221; to be friendly even though it took me a decade to get used to it. My Dad&#8217;s documentation takes up half the length of a filing cabinet drawer. Claud Scott takes up four or five inches. They are just the tip of the iceberg.  After properly filing fifty years worth of dross and gems I have about 15 full length filing cabinet drawers of papers to organize divided into three roughly equal portions about my politics, my school board work and my family&#8217;s life. And I have an almost equal load of paperwork on the book I started to research in 2006 about what I think was the biggest political scandal in Minnesota history back in 1978.<\/p>\n<p>30 file cabinet drawers!!!!! That&#8217;s why I insisted on turning my attic into a proper office and filing space. <a href=\"https:\/\/duluthreader.com\/articles\/2019\/11\/07\/113856-on-being-a-student-until-the-day-i-die\">I really better live to be 100<\/a> if I&#8217;m going to get through it all. If I don&#8217;t Claudia has made it clear. When I die she&#8217;s renting an Industrial dumpster and throwing it all out. I need to summarize it before she gets her hand on my evidence.<\/p>\n<p><em>NOTE: This and other recent posts were spewed out with no editing because my head needed a quick emptying.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have been organizing fifty years of clutter. I am doing it with the intention of reviewing it for future writing projects. Its a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,47],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31952"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31952"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31963,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31952\/revisions\/31963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}