For the life of me, I do not know the difference between a closet and a cupboard. Nor between either of those and a cabinet. I do know, because I have been told by someone very knowledgeable about these things, that our house has many examples of each. Every room in our house, except for our living room, boasts of at least one of these mysterious openings. I am, however, pleased to report that I know a little about the class that includes closets, cabinets and cupboards. I know, for example, that they are enclosures into which one is supposed to stuff items, such as clothes, dishes, canned goods, cellophane wrapped dried goods, medicines, silverware, dishes, suitcases, boots, outerwear, underwear, Christmas presents and anything you want to hide when the arrival of company is imminent. I also know that each has doors, which, unlike our entrance doors, are not kept locked, but are usually kept closed, a practice at which my wife is truly adept. Not so, her husband, however. I am often derelict in performing similarly, for which I sometimes receive a wrinkle of the brow and a gentle, unspoken rebuke. The contents of any of the various enclosures would leave you staggered with their number and variety. These would include, among other items, coats, umbrellas, boots, gumshoes, underwear, socks, old not yet discarded computers, paperwork from taxes that go back to Kennedy’s administration, newspapers from the days of the Nixon administration, China dishes, glassware, dried and canned food products, all kinds of other edible substances some partially eaten, shirts, pants, inkless ballpoint pens, pointless pencils, and other useless stationery artifacts. When my wife puts things into one of the spaces, they are placed carefully, the position of each item carefully considered, each arranged in some aesthetically pleasing order: alphabetic, numerical, the order in which they are expected to be used, by date, color or composition and, sometimes, by other criteria of whose origin and specifics, I have absolutely no idea. If I mention that I need something from one of the structures, she can tell me which one holds it, on which shelf it resides, and exactly where on the shelf it is located. I can only marvel at the extent of her memory. On the other hand I tend to place things in a very haphazard fashion, completely free of order of any kind. I like to call it my random bulk sorting system. Where the socks that my wife stores are carefully sorted by color, folded and stored neatly in pairs, those serviced by me are simply thrown into their receptacles in unsorted heaps to be retrieved by twos as needed, regardless of their color, style or fit. Any mismatches or misfits will be pointed out by my wife and subsequently corrected. All other garments are treated with the same care given my socks, with tenderness by my wife, with total abandon by me. Some of those cabinets or whatever, to which I referred above, are built into the rooms they occupy and some are free-standing and can, if so desired, be moved from location to location. Some contain shelves. These, I think, are for clothes, dishes, boots, and other things like that. Others contain drawers and are for socks, underwear and silverware. They may be used for other things, I guess, but I don’t feel like looking into it right now. Those that have only drawers may be called something else, but since I don’t know the name applied to them, I shall group them with the others. Some very useful cupboards, or whatever they are, contain, only drawers into which I place documents that I pretend are extremely important, such as insurance papers, letters that I have sent to well-known people, most of whom no one else has ever heard of, instruction manuals for electronic equipment that I have never read and almost certainly never will, overhead transparencies that I have created for classroom use and think are rather special. There are other items in there that I don’t remember but will add if I can come up with them later Our entire cellar appears to be used for storage. It is divided into rooms, to which we have assigned names like “the furnace room”, or “the dryer room”, and so on. But they are all used for storage, mostly of non-food items, except when I take some food into them and forget to remove it when I leave. The cellar also contains a bookshelf half the length of our house. Like all of the other bookshelves in our house, of which there is at least one in every room, it is abrim with books, some of which have been read and all of which are intended to be read at some unspecified time in the future. I hope that there is enough time in our futures to be able to accomplish this pleasant task, but I am not sure there is. Anyway, even though I cannot distinguish the many storage enclosures by name, I am able to store items with gainful regularity. Now, if only I could remember what items I stored in which cabinet (or whatever it is called) it would make my life very much easier. 886 words