Re-Establishing Domestic Tranquility

As an expert on retirement, I’m here to tell you that it is not uncomplicated to leave one kind of life to take up another.

Usually it doesn’t take me long to become a ranking authority on almost anything, the newspaper game prizing a quick study. But I must be slowing up, as it is already nine weeks since crossing that Great Dividing Line between full employment and consultancy, and only now am I ready to share what I have learned, not always painlessly.

Conventional wisdom holds that when a woman and man join in wedlock, a period of adjustment is necessary. After all, two people, often more or less strangers to each other in the quirkiness of their persons and personalities, all of a sudden are thrown together to share every day of their lives with each other. It is only reasonable for it to take time for them to get comfortable with each other.

Something resembling that early rite of conciliation occurs when one of the members of the household, for 40 or 50 years distinguished more by his absence for a good chunk of the work day, becomes a regular presence in the establishment. Not surprisingly, the rules of accommodation worked out early in married life, which evolved into parameters for each of the partners, are now subjected to the kinds of stresses that split the Titanic on her way to the bottom of the North Atlantic.

For the manager of the household it is not only the vexing underfootness of the newly unemployed spouse. Everywhere the housekeeping member turns, she is sure to bump into the guy who is not all that certain where to put himself at various segments of a suddenly elongated and agenda-less day.

For the new arrival, on the other hand, even a cursory examination reveals a compelling need for instituting systems to bring a modicum of method and efficiency to the operation.

We are talking here not about the kind of white glove inspection to detect whisps of dust. That would be overkill and foolish. The need for systemic coherence is much more basic and relevant than that.

Take the pantry, for example, the logistical base of the household, where necessary provisions are stored for both immediate and longer-range uses. Now, there is no need to arrange the canned goods in alphabetical order the way they were in a film a number of years ago, which portrayed an obsessive family stacking their groceries just so. That behavior, of course, was a broad parody, a literal version of a pratfall, and need not concern normally stable people.

There can be little argument that a pantry needs to be structured to function efficiently. While lining canned goods up from Abalone to Zucchini would be ludicrous indeed, clustering food stuffs according to their kind is eminently sound.

Thus, all soups should be united, as, for their part, should all vegetables. Sardines should abide by the kippered herring. Sugar should be near the salt and pepper. Teas should come together and adjoin the coffees and cocoas. (By the way, it is not necessary to segregate the decaffeinated from the regular; there’s no need to overdo a good thing.)

Now what could be simpler to accomplish while simultaneously making housekeeping life easier for the one person who, in practice, most vigorously resists the doing of it?

In fact, her reaction tends to transcend resistance and elevates the matter, needlessly, into a battle for territorial rights. It is, finally, a resort to emotion rather than reason.

What goes for the pantry certainly is applicable to the cutlery. Who can argue against teaspoons mingling with their own kind, protected from being overwhelmed by the soup spoons? Cake forks should have their own domain, close by but separate from their larger brethren, the dining forks.

Here, as in many other aspects of domestic life, neatness counts.

There are categories throughout the household where thoughtful analyses could, given only the merest chance, bring a New Order, and through it, a New Way of Life, marked by efficiency, rationality and their handmaiden, serenity.

As, however, after nearly nine weeks these excellent suggestions for the upgrading of the home environment having been either flatly turned down or adopted only with a half-heart (in an apparent attempt not to drown the would-be reformer in a sea of utter rejection), a calculated withdrawal has become a tactical necessity.

For the forseeable future, it is prudent to pick out an inconspicuous corner of the household and there concentrate on the affairs of the wider world, which have perforce been neglected by the effort to turn one’s capacities to good use on the home front.

Another day will surely come. At least, it’s comforting to think so.

xxxx