Columnist Scott Dickensheets: How not to clean a mess of biblical proportions

Scott Dickensheets

Tuesday, Dec. 2, 1997 | 9:52 a.m.

But the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish three days and three nights. -- Jonah 1:17.

I THINK of my garage as the Batcave -- not as a hip allusion to Batman's secret refuge, but rather as a place where you might plausibly find bats. It's dark and mysterious, and every so often one of the kids says, "I'm sure I heard something in there."

It has never known a car; we parked a Ping Pong table in there almost immediately. Unfortunately, it's been years since the table has known Ping Pong. If cleanliness is indeed next to godliness, clearly I'm doomed.

Because this is how I deal with the garage: Open the door without switching on the light, quickly heave in whatever needs to be stored, then slam the door before I can glimpse the interior. It's called plausible deniability, people: Sorry, dear, I didn't know the garage was in such bad shape!

For some reason, it reminds me of Jonah and the whale. In the same way he went AWOL when God laid a heavy responsibility on him, I've retreated from my duty to clean the garage. I have procrastinated, I have equivocated mightily, and when that wasn't enough, I have pretended I didn't have a garage at all -- it's a "junk room." Ah, but, as the tale of Jonah reminds us, you can only duck your fate for so long before it looms up and swallows you.

So when the sun rose Sunday, I knew it was time. Of course, I didn't actually get around to it until 4:30 p.m. or so, but only because I had to fortify myself with several hours of football viewing and public-affairs television. Then, like the mouth of the whale, my garage door opened. And like Jonah, in I went.

"The engulfing waters threatened me, the deep surrounded me; seaweed was wrapped around my head." -- Jonah 2:5.

One imagines that by virtue of swimming around with its mouth open, a whale would acquire a substantial garbage gut: license plates, bobbing French Navy trash, the occasional son of Amittai fleeing an angry god.

My garage is something like that, heaped with the most amazing collection of aimless stuff. The shelving unit holds a falling stack of old Banana Republic catalogues (from the days when it was good); my old college notebooks (containing some of the best doodles I've ever done and surprisingly few class notes); the amusingly haphazard collection of tools we've gathered over the years. In one corner sits a $2 thrift-store painting, executed in a fetching neo-primitive style and signed "Modigliani." My wife loathes it, which is why it's in the garage.

That's just what I could identify; there were plenty of dim shapes whose purpose I could only guess at. Near the front there was an impacted tangle of lawn furniture -- it would take the jaws of life to get that apart. So much, so much! It wasn't exactly seaweed wrapped around my head, but nonetheless I felt my faith waivering.

And the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land. -- Jonah 2:10.

Jonah spent three days and nights inside the whale, which seems like an unreasonably long time, at least for a garage cleaning. Anyway, unlike Jonah, I had a Broncos game to catch. The Batcave could wait; thankfully, there is no commandment against a messy garag -- Hey, what's that whale doing in here?