Everything in its place

By TERRY TOMALIN
Published January 6, 2006

Standing in front of his home one day, my friend Joe Lain pointed to the spot on his lawn where the driveway met the street.

"Look at that edge," he said. "That is the key to everything in life: good clean lines."

Lain, the surfing sage from Roger Mills County Oklahoma, has always been a stickler for details. As the Beach Safety Supervisor for the City of Clearwater, he insisted his lifeguards have everything "lined out" before they hit the stand.

Every rescue can, every first-aid box, every paddle board must be in its proper place. After all, what good is something if you can't find it?

I have thought about that little piece of advice offered more than a decade ago every day since. When I look in my tackle box and see that some hooks have found their way into the sinker compartment, I stop and put them in the proper place.

Friends who visit my garage leave thinking that I'm a little weird because I categorize my outdoor equipment on different shelves. The top shelf is for sleeping bags and tents. The next shelf is for dry bags and scuba gear. The shelf below that is for my specialized clothing: paddling jackets, wet-suit booties, rash guards, etc.

"Dude, you are a little anal," my friend Keith Dudley said when he saw my long underwear separated into zip-lock bags marked light weight, medium weight and heavy weight. "I would hate to be your wife."

At work I hate when people sit at my desk. Every file, every book ( have more than 100) and every paper clip has its assigned spot, and I know if something has been moved.

I guess I can thank or blame my father for this personality quirk. He was the master of organization. When we went camping - and he often took seven or eight of us - he always had a box for maps, a box of cooking equipment and a box of repair stuff. If something broke, at our site or anybody else's in the campground, he was the man to fix it.

Before he took his tribe anywhere, my old man had reconnoitered every dirt road, boat ramp, grocery store and hardware store within miles. Once, while wilderness camping on a lake on Maine's Allagash Waterway, he arranged for a seaplane to bring fresh supplies halfway through our three-week trip.

I'm sure my mother, sisters and brothers suspected he was a tad mad, especially when he would stand his eyebrows straight up and make that scary face with the flashlight, but I always thought he was nothing short of genius.

He was just as bad at home. Our garage was a temple of Craftsman Tools, and God forbid a crescent wrench or pair of needle-nose pliers wound up in the wrong box.

My father said his experiences as a Boy Scout and later as an officer with the U.S. Army in North Africa, Sicily and Italy during World War II had taught him that proper preparation prevents poor performance.

But there must have been some method to his madness, for my father's friends called him "The King" long before Elvis Presley stole the title. And while His Royal Highness never had the pleasure to meet the Surfing Sage of Roger Mills County, Oklahoma, I am sure the two would have had a good time making lists, checking gear, getting ready to knock whatever curveball Mother Nature threw their way right out of the ball park.

So in 2006 I will not make any new year's resolutions. I will just keep doing what I know works and make sure that I have everything, "All lined out."

[Last modified January 6, 2006, 01:04:19]