Paul Fredenberg | Community Contributor

“Please close the garage door,” Alison warned me just as I was climbing into bed, clearly put off by my recent habit of keeping it wide open. “People take stuff.”

I quickly dismissed her concern and instead got comfortable with my newspaper.

“You’re asking for it, you know,” she continued.

“Believe me, I know,” I said. “I really am asking for it.”

I had just spent the better part of my Saturday attempting to organize the mess in the garage. Short of leaving out a tray of cookies, I wanted to be as accommodating as possible to destructive rodents, biblical-scale hailstorms and enterprising garage-hopping teenagers.

Aside from my secret stash of “hecho en Mexico” Cokes and my weed whacker, I would have gladly traded the rest of the garage contents for a little peace of mind and a clear path to the recycling bin.

Over the years I’ve gotten much better at keeping my New Year’s resolutions — not necessarily because I have actually become more disciplined or more capable, but rather because each year I place the bar a little lower.

So, while some folks resolve to up their level of community service, run a triathlon or motorcycle across Asia, year after year I humbly resolve to do the same thing: park a car in the garage. Yet, as our family has grown, so too has the elusiveness of that simple resolution.

Over 13 years of married life, Alison and I have lived in a variety of settings. We’ve parked on city streets, in suburban carports, and on country driveways. But only once, in my recollection, did we ever park in a garage.

The experience was so foreign that the car ended up parked not only in the garage, but also partially inside our home. Since that day years ago when the minivan pierced the threshold of our laundry room, no automobile has again even come close to piercing the threshold of the garage.

Instead, the garage has evolved into a thorny, tangled, messy parking lot of bikes, trailers, strollers, scooters, boots, skis, wagons, baby backpacks, sleds, rollerblades, ice skates and old baseball cleats — in other words, every conceivable type of transport except the automobile.

I admit, much of the garage problem is my fault. I can’t bear to part with those dear baseball cleats, the ones I wore for so many of my memorable teenage milestones.

In them I recorded a couple of no-hitters, racked up my fourth through ninth kisses with Alison in a single, heated dugout flurry, and witnessed — in perhaps my most enduring memory of high school — my teammate hock a loogie between the cheese and crust of an unsuspecting umpire’s pizza.

Holes as big as walnuts in the toes, petrified to the stiffness of my equally sentimental 34-inch Easton aluminum bat, the metal spikes worn and rusted from both use and neglect, my cleats still stubbornly cling to the garage shelves.

So too do the 48-gallon Rubbermaids of Garbage Pail Kids, a deck of old license plates, and my ancient reservoir of brilliant pink, waterlogged Flying Lady golf balls. All of them rejoice in my vulnerability to nostalgia. Every year, every spring cleaning, despite my resolutions, they hang on for yet another year.

Not only am I overly sentimental, but I’m also overly optimistic.

They say the road to the hardware store is paved with good intentions, and my garage is where those good intentions eventually go for a nice, long siesta: the hooks for pictures never hung, the paint for designs never realized, and the drywall patches for gaping holes never repaired.

The childproofing implements — halfway out of their packages and strewn across the workbench — themselves become the very choking hazards they were meant, properly installed, to defend. Someday, I say, someday.

But by far the biggest obstacle to finally cracking my resolution are the strollers and bikes. We are just one REI sale away from having an even 20 combined. And there is just nowhere left to put them.

That night, as I sat reading the paper in bed, a growing unease crept over me. An honest half-day’s effort hadn’t gotten me any closer to achieving my resolution, much less clearing a path to the recycling bin.

I was also thirsty. Yet a few of the holdover bikes and strollers were now completely blocking access to my “hecho en Mexico” Cokes.

I came across a review for the newest V-12-powered Lamborghini. The statistics for the supercar were mind-boggling. 691 horsepower. 0-60 in 2.8 seconds. And then this strange bit: “cargo capacity, n/a.”

And that’s when the thought struck me. I could wait around for a Rapture-fueled neighborhood looting spree or I could get creative with my storage.

I sprang from the bed and raced down to the garage. Wearing only my pajamas I scooped up a few of those bicycles and strollers and put them in the only place I could think of. The only place with any remaining capacity for my cargo.

For the sixth straight year I gave up on my New Year’s resolution to park the van in the garage.

Instead I parked some of the garage in the van.

Paul Fredenberg lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and seven children. He can be reached at psfredenberg@gmail.com.