Ask not what your country can do for you;

Ask what you can do for your country.

-- John F. Kennedy

After a lifetime of asking what my country can do for me I decided to turn the other cheek and ask what I can do for my country. Immediately there was a problem: Whom do I ask?

I decided to begin by asking myself: "What can you do for your country?"

Putting the question in the second person somehow gave it clarity and force. The first thing I thought of doing for my country was to go text-a-twittering across the land, sowing 140 smiles per mile, as Johnny Appleseed sowed apples.

That thought made me feel good. Patriotic. Reborn. But I realized it was subject to misinterpretation by shrinks and their ilk.

Anyway, it didn't get at what was bugging me. What was bugging me was the guilt I felt for having dwelt so long with the twin addictions of conspicuous consumption (CC) and instant gratification (IG), for having indulged myself with earmarks and pork.

After many a sleepless night I conceived a mode of debugment. It wasn't anything dramatic, such as helping my country achieve a 180-degree economic turn-around. That's above my pay grade, to coin a phrase.

Many people, even those fiscally handicapped like me, say we're in the worst recession since the Great Depression. That's a mighty deep dilemma to fathom, and it does need fathoming. But my credentials beckoned me elsewhere.

I explored the terrain, and came up with, and quickly rejected, a number of things I could do for my country, such as:

• Compiling for Rahm Emanuel, President Barack Obama's chief of staff, a dictionary of euphemisms so he could retrieve them ready-made, right off the rack. Example: "Pork, the other white meat."

• Starting a Pontiac museum.

• Coaching the U.S. cup-stacking team for the Olympics.

• Joining Americorps or MoveOn.Org., unless my age would disqualify me (93).

• Detoxifying toxic assets, after I find out what toxic assets are.

• Write another chapter of the bankruptcy code, with several paragraphs for cases like GM and Chrysler.

And on and on. Those and others were roads not taken.

I decided my best option was to reverse my addiction to CC and IG. Radical intervention. Expiation. Penitence. To my country I would bestow the results as an example to all of prudent financial management, of how to purge oneself of earmarks, both personal and governmental.

Expiation and penitence in this realm are not easily achieved. The condition is pandemic, etiology unknown. There is no effective vaccine. And where do you find someone who will say, "Ego te absolvo?"

My self-imposed therapy began with a resolve to dispose of any of my possessions that are patently the result of CC and IG. Here are some. (Caution: This is not a tag sale. Most of these already are gone.):

• Fourteen golf shirts.

• Seven golf jackets.

• An array of golf clubs, including three sets of irons.

• Five TV sets.

• A boxful of 78 rpm records.

• Many slides for which I have no projector.

• A snowblower not used for 15 years.

• Fifty neckties.

• Forty-seven suits and jackets.

• Forty pairs of socks.

• Three pairs of shoes from Maxwell in London.

• Three thousand books, including a 20-pound "Who's Who."

• Five sets of "Foyle's War" DVDs.

This gives you an idea as to the extent of my addiction. On the positive side, I do contend that I am a soul not completely lost. I never bought a boat, a pickup truck or an SUV.

I like to think this mode of expiation for my addiction was not just an ego trip. Though I'm not under the illusion that my demonstration of penitence has done much for my country.

But let scoffers scoff and laughers laugh. At least it was not something my country did for me.

And, mirabile dictu, my basement, garage and clothes closets are a lot neater.