Symmetry

         

          I’ve noticed lately that I need my days to be symmetrical, a place for everything and everything in its place. I don’t mean my days are rigidly repetitive or monotonously regimented, even though in many ways they are. I mean that each day should see a task completed or that my life and the things I own or things that own me should all be like little soldiers all lined up in a row. I keep my books together on their shelves by author, and I love to see them there, and whenever my wife misplaces one, they all look wrong until I put it in its proper place. I try to keep all my e-mails to-and-from in separate folders on my hard drive, all dated, all chronological. How handy it is to see what someone wrote to me one or more years ago. I get a haircut once a month; I shave daily; I take my blood pressure every morning as I drink my juice; every three weeks I take out all my prescription bottles and reload the appropriate pills into my weekly pillboxes; I keep track on the calendar of all the dates for having blood drawn for the many different medical specialists I now visit with too much regularity; I change my oxygen line and cannulas regularly (monthly for the line, weekly for the cannulas); and my wife and I go out for dinner every Tuesday and Thursday. I love to cook, but my favorite dishes are what can be prepared ahead of time, like tuna casserole, chili, beef stew, or oven chicken, and after I’ve prepared a meal I immediately have to clean up and put away any dishes I used in the preparation. I have little tasks I need to finish to put my house and life in order. I spent several weeks getting LED lights lined up along our driveway, not because we needed them to guide visitors to our home but because they’re part of the symmetry. We had a number of problems with our irrigation system, either minor leaks or too little water going to various trees and flower beds. One by one they got fixed and now they’re all symmetrical. These blogs I write get printed using my Clickbook software that prints them as a booklet, four pages to each sheet back to front. Right after every December 31, I print them, then cut the pages, punch six holes in the stack, print and punch a cover and back page, bind the pages with heavy upholstery thread, then duct tape the back to cover the binding, then line up the finished product with the others back to 2009, along with all the bound annual journals back to our arrival in Sun City west twenty-three years ago. My dotage is all neatly symmetrical. Pretty obsessive, pretty compulsive, right? Yeah. But it’s just my way of preparing for my departure. I’m not afraid of  shuffling "off this mortal coil.” I just want what was me to be in symmetrical order so that my wife and/or my children won’t have any heartache or problem putting me and my “stuff” away. This is not my Thanatopis. It’s my Symmetropsis. I like to think it’s a felicitous examination of what was a symmetrical perspective of my life. I don’t want my life to be like what Keats in his epitaph said about himself, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” But I also don’t want it “writ in stone.” That smacks too much of a lonely granite headstone somewhere out in the boonies.

          Today’s exercise in symmetry involves getting this blog finished and inserted into Doggy Dog World, going to CVS to pick up another prescription, then on to Fry’s for two ribeyes, two small potatoes, and eight jumbo shrimp for our New Year’s Eve dinner, after which we’ll watch the crowds freezing their asses off waiting for the ball to drop in Times Square. Then, just after 10:00 Arizona time, we’ll toddle off to bed, crossing off another symmetrical year.