Rutledge: The key to having a clean garage

GREENVILLE, N.C. — When I was a kid, my dad maintained the cleanest garage in town. It was easy then. He hadn't accumulated a lot of stuff and he had me for scouring the floor.

Garage day meant moving everything into the driveway — including the rubber mats for oil drippings — hosing down the cement floor, scrubbing it with a broom and Tide laundry detergent and using a big squeegee to push out all the water after hosing it down again.

The job consumed the better part of a Saturday at least four times a year. The only fun part for me was backing out the '65 Chevy Impala and '72 Dodge Dart and pulling them back in again.

That garage, the clean one, was connected to a house in town that we left in 1977. The garage my parents have in east Tennessee now is in the country and as detached from the concept of cleanliness as it is from the farmhouse.

There are no rubber mats to collect the oil drippings, but that's OK. There's no room in there for cars anyway.

My brother, Jeff, who was too young to get in on the city-living garage days of yore, recently helped me clear some clutter from today's facility.

Dad's not able to help, so mom resolved any disagreements we had over what should stay and what could go to the dump.

"How about this old scale?" I asked. It was a tall, heavy thing straight out of Norman Rockwell's doctor's office.

"You might as well take it on," she said. "Somebody in the church gave that to your daddy more than 30 years ago, and it was old then."

"So what you're telling me," my brother asserted as we loaded the dusty relic onto the truck, "is that we're throwing away a valuable antique."

"That's exactly what we're telling you," I said.

This was no garage day for sentimentality — except for the plastic ball that's been around since my older sister and I were toddlers, and the highchair that's in all our first-birthday snapshots.

Almost anything else of questionable value I declared worthy of eternal municipal rest. And I was right proud of myself, until I returned home and was confronted with the sad truth that I've become quite detached from my own garage.

When we moved in more than seven years ago, I had visions of keeping the cement floor clean and shiny, just like dad's old garage. I even bought a big rubber squeegee just like the one he had.

But in seven years, I've held a grand total of two garage days that involved moving everything out, scrubbing the floor and moving everything back in again.

It's been so long since my garage floor has seen a broom, even the spiders have moved out.

The key to having a clean garage, I've discovered, is having a kid who can handle a rubber squeegee. My oldest is 8 and her garage days will arrive soon.

Meanwhile, perhaps I could invite my brother, who presently has no garage of his own, to come over and spend the better part of a Saturday helping me sort through my valuable antiques.

Mark Rutledge writes for The Daily Reflector in Greenville, N.C. E-mail mrutledge AT coxnc.com