A Place For Everything

I am fairly sure that most people, perhaps more likely the older, but younger may have been subjected to this too, know the phrase: ” A Place for Everything, and Everything in its Place.” I heard it constantly uttered as a child, but always from my grandparents, never anyone else. Perhaps it is a thing which springs over a generation now and then, as those on the receiving end vow never to repeat what they have experienced in their youth, and bring their children up differently, or perhaps it is just me. Regardless of which, as I get inevitably older, it is a sentence I have begun using to myself and, occasionally, when confronted by something left out of place by my partner.

We do not live together, I must add, since both of us have had enough experience of the close quarters of other people in our lives, and decided it is very much a relationship killer. And, as a result, we have completely different lives, and conceptions of what life and home life should be like. There is a certain order in my own apartment, which does not repeat itself in theirs. I possess things they have never used, or even thought of, starting with different sized spoons for different purposes which, when I point out the difference between an egg spoon and a teaspoon, causes some merriment. A soup spoon was unheard of before I arrived on the scene, and is still not completely understood. These items have their own sections in kitchen drawers, and can be placed in the wrong compartment at will, if one does not know what they are, their purpose, their place in the general order of things. The universe, in its great wisdom, did not endow all of us with a superior knowledge of which spoon is used for dessert and which for a runny boiled egg, otherwise it wouldn’t be superior, but merely general knowledge. Many children learn how to use a knife and fork in kindergarten, I am told, if their parents have not been able to educate them in such niceties earlier, but not in what all the other utensils are.

There is, however, a completely different reason why this phrase has come back into my mind and into use of late, and it has nothing to do with me morphing into an image of my grandparents, nor with chastising my partner or educating them in the finer arts of culinary etiquette. I am getting older, as are we all, and know that there is a need for a higher level of order in my life.

It begins with house keys. I am sure we have all had this experience: we put the keys down somewhere, and then spend half a day searching for them again when we are in a hurry to get out and do something of middling importance. Or there is that thing which belongs inside that instrument and is of the utmost importance which we just set down right here, ready to use it, barely a month ago, or perhaps yesterday, and isn’t there any more. Amusing for others, frustrating for the person searching, and something that I have noticed in myself which causes some worry.

It causes some worry because, not only am I coming to that age, but I have seen it in others. I have seen a lack of order in their lives which ends in frustration and tears, when the house keys cannot be found, or something is not where we expect it to be, even though it is always there, always. Absentmindedness, perhaps, or the onset of dementia. Who hasn’t decided to make themselves a new cup of tea, been distracted by something, then come back to make the tea, and found the tea they had made before sitting on the table, untouched? Perhaps it is just me after all.

I am training myself for what could be the inevitable. This is another generational jump thing: my grandfather – father’s side – suffered dementia in his final years. He also suffered from a stroke and had to be re-educated to talk in his late Sixties which, for someone who received a medal for services to education, must have been a very hard blow. I am training myself, if you will, for the day when the normal memory has gone, and when I need to use my motor instincts, need to be able to automatically go to a place, do a thing, find a something without the need for thought or consideration. I am preparing myself for the inevitability of someone asking whether I am capable of living on my own, and suggesting that I give up those last vestiges of freedom found within my own four walls. If I know where everything is, if everything is in its place, as it has been for years, I am safe.