Junk drawers are an interesting phenomenon. Most everyone has one. We dip into them often but hardly ever talk about them, maybe because we are a bit ashamed of them, like an ugly pet, which we love nonetheless, or a ramshackle relative.
I suppose there are some people who have no junk drawers, but they aren't the kind of people you would want to associate with.Never trust a person who hasn't got at least one junk drawer. An unwillingness to tolerate the private shambles of a junk drawer suggests a probable intolerance of all things in general, including a tendency to scrutinize every little deformity or to judge every imperfect gesture of those around him/her/them. See, already, just thinking about such prudes, I am beginning to worry about my gen-der.
Historically, junk drawers are as old as the dresser, as familiar as the cupboard, as intimate as the knapsack. I would not be surprised if even nomadic tribes, who live in tents, have junk drawers, though they may not use the word "drawer" per se . . . maybe something more like "sack," "packet" or "bag."
Bag ladies are probably the ultimate junk drawer connoisseurs, a classic example of the basic human tendency toward frugality and an obsession to save things - one of our most endearing, and enduring, human traits.
A man who is not a doctor but who plays one on TV once said that somewhere in the back of our minds there is a frugal fold of brain that is constantly on guard, telling us to beware, that sometime soon everything is going to collapse and that the last thing we discarded was exactly what we will sometime need to be saved from a world tumbling hopelessly awry.
The earliest junk drawer of my own memory was located in the corner of the kitchen cupboards of our basement home. Tucked against the wall and across from the coal stove, just under the knife and fork drawer, it held an abundance of average treasures.
Like the knife and fork drawer, it had three sections - two front and one in the back. Once you put something in the back of the drawer there was a good chance it would never resurface. The two front sections held an odd assortment of utensils and tools, those odd objects that have no other home, things like nutcrackers and screwdrivers with reshaped or twisted ends or, if they are Phillips screwdrivers, ends that have been ground smooth from twisting wrong-size frozen screws.
There was also a potato masher (too large for the knife and fork drawer), and a pan grabber thing with a mouth that looked like a dinosaur, and a half-rolled-up tube of airplane cement that had leaked and was stuck to one side of the drawer.
As I recall this, all kinds of other things come to mind - green and orange plastic Utah sales tax tokens from the '40s (I used to chew on them until they broke in half . . . plastic was still an oddity), bottle caps for the bottle capper my mom had but never used - and rubber bands and string and short bits of pencil with broken points.
Thinking of string, a friend of ours who goes to a lot of estate sales once came upon a junk drawer with a ball of short strings rolled together and a little note that had written on it: "strings too short to use."
Isn't it interesting that when we know the strings are too short, when we know in the front of our minds that most of that which we save in junk drawers is completely useless, that little frugal fold of brain takes precedent, subtly saying over and over, "keep it, keep it, keep it." Panicking, we begin searching for the right shelf, the perfect, proper place - where we can save whatever it is we can't gird up our loins enough to throw away because we know someday we will need it.
And as so typically happens with the stuff that has no place, we resort at last to the homeless shelter for all lost objects - the lowly, but always receptive junk drawer.
So for all those tiny bottles of aftershave gone sour, for all those coupons for a free 5-by-7 photo with your next roll of film, for all those broken knobs from the kitchen cupboard, and all those pennies tucked in the corners, and the 3-by-5 note cards with shopping lists, and laundry tickets, and safety pins from laundry come home - for all these lowly objects of our daily struggle to face the world, let us give a warm salute to the quiet and unassuming junk drawer; she expects no honor for her labors, she asks for nothing in return, only that she be replenished from time to time with the random bits and pieces of our lives that have no other place to go.
Dennis Smith is an artist and writer living in Highland, Utah County. "Meanderings: A Place to Grow," a compilation of his Deseret News columns, is available in local bookstores.