Leftovers are a guy’s weakness

Like a lot of guys, I keep leftovers in the garage.

Leftover parts that is, plus assorted nuts and bolts and miscellaneous scraps of wood. And, um, well, not exactly “in” the garage, but in bins, cans, night stands, desk drawers, closets and shelves throughout the house. Sometimes I store things in the boxes they originally came in and other times I keep them in official guy-type storage devices – you know, five-gallon buckets, tool boxes and roll-away cabinets.

I think you get the idea.

But I’m an underachiever compared to guys I’ve met who don’t limit themselves to just a modest rancher with an attached garage in which to cache their treasures. They have a shop out back and it’s stuffed to overflowing, too. In fact, if you want a sure-fire way to know if a guy is a real, genuine red-blooded modern-day American hunter-gatherer or just a pathetic weenie, just check out the size of his shop. If it has more square footage than his house and any other house on the block, he’s golden.

Nothing’s ever big enough for a guy with good credit and a patient wife.

If you search through my probably-should-be-buried treasure, you’ll find some oddball little molded plastic gizmos and then ask me why I kept them, and I’ll tell you a cockamamie story about how, once upon a time late one Sunday last century, I spent hours looking high and low for a special part that came with a do-it-yourself furniture kit because I knew – I just knew – that that part was the key to repairing a broken appliance but, because I had just thrown the stupid thing out, I had to junk the appliance and buy a new one.

And I hate spending money – that’s the truth.

In reality, most of the stuff in my garage has that “been here for decades” look. Yet, as long as I don’t throw anything away, I don’t need it. If I do throw something away, I will. So, in a nod to Moore’s Law – which says you must buy a new computer every two years or be ridiculed by your youngest child – I’ve coined the “Law of More,” which simply states “Buy often; discard nothing.”

We males buy houses and build shops and fill up every nook and cranny with a million little pieces so that we don’t ever have to waste time going to the store to buy a dozen No. 8 wood screws. And we have a perfect rationale for continuing to do so now that “carbon footprint” is the phrase du jour and every product on Earth sprouts a sticker proclaiming it will stop global warming. Somehow the combination of buying everything we want and never throwing anything away has become a patriotic duty that helps save the planet, too.

I don’t know who you should blame for this but I know who I should blame. My dad, who died 10 years ago this Memorial Day, was the quintessential pack rat. When he died, I found three – or was it four? – broken VCRs in his garage, as well as their detailed electrical plans just in case he ever wanted to fix one of them. His desk, which was in the house, was packed with a riot of parts, memorabilia and just plain stuff.

One antidote to this curse of guy-dom is to move, because stuff is heavy and you get tired carrying it around. When my wife, Deborah, and I bought our current home, I disposed of a lot of rare and ancient treasures, mostly college textbooks, because I don’t know of any way to use Faust to repair an appliance. But moving is not a panacea, either; it took me five years to take a desk to the dump that got broken during the last adventure.

All this proves yet again that women are so much smarter than men. You won’t see a woman trying to break a recalcitrant lug nut with a piece of crusty old bread or swatting flies with moldy meatloaf; a man might and he’d call it “being creative.” Women are far too smart for that. They’ve got genes men can only dream about.

Women know the truth about leftovers.

It’s we guys who need to learn.