In a desperate and assuredly ultimately futile effort to get something useful accomplished I have been cleaning, de-cluttering, and organizing my office room. To that effect, I bought something from an estate sale – it was marked a dollar, but I bought it on half-off Saturday… so I paid fifty cents.

It’s a bilious cube of cheap turquoise green plastic, with four clear lucite drawers. I have a vision of organizing small parts in these drawers and setting the unit within reach of my work table… when I need some tiny something or other, there it is – rather than spending a tired wasted evening looking in vain, digging through tangled piles of crap, and uncovering, too late, items that I had pursued weeks ago and now find useless while my grail quest goes forever ungratified.

A useless and hopeless vision, I know, but such is life.

One unexpected bonus, though – easily worth the four bits I paid. Inside the thing I discovered an original sales label touting the virtues of the purchase.

It’s a Handi-Chest – made in the U.S.A. By Campro Products, of Canton Ohio. There are four helpful illustrations indicating possible uses:

• On the dresser for jewelry, notions
• Mighty handy for sewing supplies and accessories
• For the office a real “organizer”
• In the workshop “a place for everything and everything in its place”

So maybe my delusions of adequacy aren’t unique – the thing was designed and constructed (from my best guess, about the time I was born) to meet the same fantasy that still flits around all these long decades later.

I love old postwar advertisements. It was a simpler time – a time of smiling men and women, a time without snark, a time made up of line drawings. It was Mad Men time – the advertising executives thought up this stuff right after their three martini lunches (that might help explain the surreality lurking below the surface) and sent it all off to the Midwest to be extruded, printed, boxed up, and set out on the shelves.

KEEP IT * FIND IT * IN A JIFFY

Those were the days.