Immaculate Conception

You are composed of three parts; body, breath and mind. The first two merely belong to you in the sense that you are responsible for their care; the last alone is truly yours. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

She has a precise, orderly mind. Well tuned to detail. She has her priorities set right. Knows what is of high value. Sets her intent on accomplishing, completing what she begins. A point of pride; discipline, sequence, co-ordination, orderly habit, concise, meticulous, appropriate, meaningful. We must know what it is we set about doing, convince ourselves it is worth doing well, and throw ourselves into the effort. Therein lies pride in accomplishment.

She was convinced she had been born with the pre-ordained instinct of an orderly mind. Deep within her genetic code lay that insistent urge. Her DNA was imprinted with an urge to tidiness. Not that this was her only genetic inheritance of note. She had, she thought, modestly, more than her share of intelligence. And was not the least bit averse to demonstrating it, when called for.

Even as a child she recognized the difference, the vast difference between disorderliness and order. In one lay confusion, the other satisfaction. Her mother’s household, she quickly realized, was of the former variety. Her mother’s slovenly slap-dash approach to housekeeping had offended her even-then impeccable sense of order, when she was so very young. It was a cause of personal shame to her. That entry into her mother’s domain was to be confronted with the mess of a life overwhelmed by detail. The detail of everyday life that some people seem functionally incapable of settling into with the needed measure of complacent order. She little realized at that time, that her mother had surrendered to an exhaustion of the spirit.

Then, she had been convinced that those, like her mother, who readily threw up their hands at any attempt to make order of chaos made the choice - through the sad failure of faint heart - of living with detritus, cobwebs, objects strewn everywhere; a tableau of dysfunction. Stumbling through the course of their days, bewildered by the incessant calls to duty in raising a brood, attending to their needs. Attempting, fruitlessly to pay attention to household duties, to children’s ongoing crises simply overwhelmed them.

She soon discovered, that while she hesitated mightily to ever invite playmates into her mother’s household, her playmates felt no such compunctions about their own homes’ state of dishevelment, for unfailingly, it was also brought to her attention through exposure to the worn and weary atmosphere prevailing in the homes of others that her mother’s failings were shared by legions of others. Everyone seemed to live in a shambles of piled-up laundry, newspaper-littered couches, broken and disdained toys haphazardly thrown in rejection, and never quite discarded. Kitchens humbly, unapologetically strewn with unwashed cutlery and dishes, pots stained and dented, nothing ever placed out of sight into kitchen cupboards where they belonged. Disorder reigned.

Everything limned with weeks’ worth of dust, hallways tracked with the outdoor muck brought heedlessly indoors on unshed shoes. Bedrooms unshamefacedly musty with unwashed linens, the beds themselves never made up neatly for the day; windows never thrown wide to air out the night-time atmosphere of rude and peculiar bodily emanations fogging the air. Poverty, it seemed to her in retrospect, appeared the guiding framework though it took her many years to come to that understanding.

She aspired, even while she despaired over the state of her mother’s house, even while, if she complained, her mother set her to washing floors, scrubbing bathtubs, wiping down kitchen cupboards, cleaning the grime-bespattered stove - none of which really helped, since this was never a regular routine, merely a convenient, sly punishment - to a different kind of everyday home life for herself. She would be proud of her home, and make her home proud of her determination to ensure it was a hygienic, comfortable atmosphere for everyone who lived there, even if she would be the only one to be aware of it. She had also noted that most people felt comfortable enough in their homes, whether or not measures were taken to instill an environment of cleanliness and order, through someone’s dedication to achieving that distinction.

All of this was important to her, but this was all background to her life. Her insistence to herself on achieving an orderly, neat and tidy life, internal and external in all its manifestations was merely a hovering shadow upon which all else rested; it represented a scaffold upon which a satisfying life could be built. It was not an absolute requirement for happiness and fulfilment, merely the appetizer that would welcome all invitations life might offer her, over courses she would avail herself of throughout the length of her life.

The course of her life encompassed a fairly normal passage to maturity, and that included a youthful marriage, and a growing family. She was never, ever a martinet. Quite content, for the most part, to live with her husband who had the in-gathering instincts of a crazed magpie. Unlike her, he was genetically driven to collect. He had fine instincts, a marvellous sense of curiosity, an aesthetic appreciation of fine things, and a burning need to learn how to proceed with anything that took his interest. His sense of comedic timing, his finely-honed and often sardonic sense of humour never failed to amuse her. His wide-ranging interests in history, geography, science, fine art and literature astonished and impressed her.

His one failing remained his unalterable dedication to gathering objects around him. Books, magazines, broken appliances, picture frames sans pictures, light fixtures, plumbing pieces, electrical bits, odd pieces of porcelain tiles; in short anything that he felt might have value at some point in the future. Nothing should be heedlessly discarded. He too came to maturity in a household lacking material comfort. He remained suspended, the young boy who acquired and accumulated all manner of potentially needful items, a boy whose pockets always brimmed with elastic bands, string, emptied pill-boxes, electrical discards. On the theory, become habit, that you never quite knew when something might come in handy. He had acquired the habit of scalping an object of its parts, to be used for the repair of other objects. The-then incomplete object would be carefully stored in the basement for possible future use. Over time, the accumulated debris constituted a mountain of reproachful trash, insulting to her sensibilities.

Once, when they were young, only their first child yet born, living in their first little house, she thought she would surprise him. While he was at work, she laboured to clear the pile of objects from the basement floor, under the stairs, and hauled the things out to the curb, to be picked up by the garbage collectors. After she had completed her task, and thought with satisfaction how grateful he would be that she had done that, she answered a knock at the front door. A man, well dressed, asking if it would be all right if he took the large elaborate frame on the pile she had tossed out to the curb. Garbage, it was garbage, of course she didn’t mind; help yourself, she said graciously.

Little did she then realize how stricken her husband would be when she informed him loftily of what she had accomplished on his behalf. He rushed down to the basement, stood there, aghast at the clean open space under the stairs. Her alter ego’s lust for collection, included an eye for recognizing items of value that might be used at some later date. The frame in question was hand-made, laboriously and beautifully carved, mid-19th Century. She never, ever repeated that indiscretion. It became a standing joke between them. Over the years he might, on occasion, point out another that resembled the one she had thrown out (she never recognized any similarity, hardly took notice of the original; to her it was just junk to be got rid of), lamenting its uniqueness and loss. But he had never really held it against her.

They worked out a system that had the value of reasonable accommodation to them. She would be in charge of everything in the living quarters of the house, and the basement was his precinct, to do with as he wished. Of course, over the years, they had owned a succession of homes. In each of which, over time, he ended up finishing the basement; dividing portions of it into additional useful living spaces, and keeping part of it unfinished, for his workshop, and in his workshop he would collect discards. Until they began, inexorably, spilling over into the finished spaces. As with books and magazines whose ownership could not be defended in the numbers he lusted after, but their allure for him could also not be denied.

As for her, she reigned supreme in the upper stories of their homes. The two floors, ground and second, were always immaculate. She dusted, mopped, washed, wiped, scrubbed, and polished. She developed her routine so perfectly well that even though she spent far more time than most women doing all these things, they did not, after all, take all that long; she was inordinately efficient. She took short-cuts when she began working outside the house once the children reached their semi-adult, secondary-school stages of life. But no one would have noticed a lessening in her determination to ensure their home was clean, neat and well-presented.

So too with their meals. Always an emphasis on fresh fruits and vegetables, comprising a large part of their diet. Well-prepared and -presented meals, wholesome and appetizing. No short cuts there. No pre-prepared or take-outs, thanks a bunch. She had assembled a nice collection of cookbooks. Favouring especially those dedicated to delicate baked goods. When the children were small they were often consulted. When they were small, they were sometimes permitted to ‘help’ their mother bake cookies made colourful with candy sprinkles. They were allowed to knead bread dough and shape them into fanciful objects that could be baked. Grey from too much handling, of course, and inedible, but a lark for the children. Over time, although she retained her cookbooks, particularly one her husband had bought in self-defence when they first married and her initial attempts at cooking had been lamentably pathetic. But she no longer really needed to consult them. Recipes, or her interpretation of them, had been consigned to the orderly files of her mind. She remembered the ingredients required, their sequence and baking time perfectly. Not merely a few favourite family recipes, but an impressively large number of various recipes for breads, fruit pies, cookies, savoury pies, salads and puddings, main course-dishes and everything in between. Solidly, confidently placed in orderly fashion in her memory files.

She also became a good and enthusiastic gardener, by default. That default being watching her then-grown daughter with her own home and garden, effortlessly and with knowledge in hand, working in her garden. The same daughter who had inherited her mother’s passion for neatness, but who had outdone her mother in method sans madness. Whose professional expertise in architectural design and project management seemed an outgrowth of her own fascination with order. Her daughter, however, utterly ruthless in her decided determination to rid herself of all items extraneous to her current need.

Their sons, on the other hand, inherited more of their father’s compelling and fascinated sense of creativity. Expressed through their own choices in biology, woodworking, pottery, astronomy, history, musical performance. Their children surpassed all their expectations. Amend that: they held no insistent expectations, were mostly content to expose their children to the world as best they could, certain that inspiration for their futures would compel them to follow their own road less travelled, complemented by their parents’ well-imbibed values.

An immaculate mind, she has, this now-elderly woman. She would be horrified to know how her grandchildren laugh fondly between themselves about Grandma ‘losing her marbles’, confusing their names, never remembering, it seemed clear enough to them, from one visit to another, what they had last talked of, and repeating, endlessly repeating the same observations they had heard so many yawningly times before.

Observe, she said to herself, she had become skilled at circumvention, circumlocution, smoothly talking over lapses in memory, slyly forestalling questions she felt incapable of responding to, confident that no one had noticed. No one but herself, for example, would know how some of those mind-garnered gardening files had begun to dissolve. The names of flowers eluding her, their habits and needs becoming confused with those of others. No, not during the growing season, not then. But as summer faded and blended into fall, then winter, those files became distorted, began to fade, were difficult to call up. But then, be reasonable, she chided herself, what need might there possibly be to keep those particular files accessible during the months that gardening became a dim memory itself? No need to be concerned. And actually, truth was, there was no need to be concerned, for as soon as spring asserted itself to be followed by summer, those names seemed to pop back into neat rows of botanical nomenclature, readily available for use. What a clever brain, what a methodical and efficient filing system…. Firing perfectly on all synapses. Or, rather, they did, fairly reliably.

Yet, and yet. There have been lapses, entirely too many. Puzzling how they seemed to accumulate. No, not recalling and speaking of the names of peonies, roses, phlox, pansies or rhododendrons. The names of everyday objects, like the little seeds she ground for daily use to be sprinkled over breakfast toast - what on Earth were they called, now? She could hardly recall the name of her daughter’s penultimate boyfriend, could only remember the current one by association. A slight pause in conversation, then a quick dredging down into the recesses of her mind, where odd name-associations were stored, to come up with “Mutt and Jeff”. How’s … Jeff? She would casually ask.

She is certain she has caught a strange whiff, from time to time, elusive, ephemeral - as though she has momentarily captured the essence of her brain’s slow journey into decay. Now, how absurdly fanciful, ghoulish, in fact, is that? Yet, she mused, one molecule after another could, for all she knew, be gradually succumbing.

But why, it’s far too soon! This is inordinately wrong, unfair. Why her, with her immaculate obsession with order? This speaks loudly of disorder, a gross violation of the meet and the just!

She has tended her life carefully, marshalled intelligence, ordered memory into neat rows of prominence, priorities and values. And the years yet before her promise ample manoeuvrability and capture of those neat files. She is, quite simply, not prepared to submit to chaos, not yet. Not ever! Her anguished being cries out to her external awareness. She will ensure this sinister awareness of the breakdown of her mental faculties remains her secret. She is, it is clear enough to herself, entirely too sensitive, imagining what is not there. What she interprets as portents of a moving fog of loss leading to a dark abyss reflects her own heightened sense of the imagination, a surreal nightmare of sub-existence.

How else explain that her husband, he of the steel-clad memory sometimes grasps to recall an errant, elusive word? Try, he tells her gently - so obviously attempting to allay her fears - try to use word-association a little more often. Sometimes it works, she knows - more often, for her, it fails. How can it work, if her memory bank is slowly depleting? Where are those words evaporating to? Wispily whisking, floating dreamily, the letters dislocated, the words bereft of their meaning, off into the ether?

She’d always loved the challenge of cross-word puzzles, with their subtle hints to a mind’s orderly files of language. Now they try her patience, pain her, and she thrusts them away from her. She thinks, from time to time, she should resume working out the answers, as she had always done, and in that way exercise her mind, extract those elusive words from their orderly files, anticipate, expect the words to be approachable. But no.

Since she began experiencing lapses in the neat array of her memory files, she has become wary and worried. Words simply got mislaid. Oh, not arcane, little-used words, but ordinary, oft-spoken parts of her vocabulary. Which had always been proudly extensive. She began to feel as though the sturdy fibre of her mind’s filing cabinets had begun to corrode. As though by some odd quirk of the flesh an excess of moist, unpleasant forgetfulness had assaulted her hitherto spotlessly-reliable summons on her memory bank. Atrophy. Her mind, after all, is who she is. What is the mind but a lifetime of memories? Slowly, a quiet terror had overtaken and suffused her sweaty night-time dreams.

She hears that old familiar refrain, spoken internally to herself: “A place for everything and everything in its place”, and she gasps with disbelief. Am I mocking myself? Having chiding little interior conversations? Unable to stop herself, she wails aloud, to an empty room: But I have put everything neatly away, where they belong, all those words that express the experience of my life. I always have. It’s just that I appear to have mislaid words. They’re not where they should be, readily extractable for daily use. They’re not where I left them. They tease and elude me. I’ve always been good to them, used them well, appreciated their power, their meaning, their indispensability to human contact. I’ve stored them diligently, tidily.

Why is this happening to me? I have always venerated words, the language of our womb-tutored tongues. How else to communicate but by forming words, those exquisite conveyances of understanding, emotion, contact, need? Now they lie shattered, meaning trivialized, the wholeness of retrieval eviscerated. I stumble in my every breath to recall, invoke them. To no avail.

Fix your thought closely on what is being said, and let your mind enter fully into what is being done, and into what is doing it. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations