I was
making my bed yesterday. I don't do it often enough. I used to do it every
week. Now I've gotten lazy and do it maybe once a month.
I do try
to take a shower before I get in there, so I won't be sleeping with a lot of
germs, and they'll only be my internal germs, I guess, since I sleep
alone.
When I had a cat, I wouldn't let him sleep with me. Maybe I avoided
toxoplasmosis infection that way.
More
recently I read an article that explained that this disease causes a particular
type of brain damage that makes you want more cats, a curious type of
symbiosis.
So I was
making my bed, and I noticed how easily I pop pillows into pillow cases, and
flip covers onto the bed. I've developed all sorts of conditioned reflexes that
make this almost effortless, which makes it hard to understand why I do it so
seldom.
I'm better
than my kids in this respect. The only times their sheets get changed are if I
have a house guest when they're away and I put clean sheets on the beds for the
guest, or if I really nag a lot.
So, I'm
doing this task, and I'm hit with the memory of when I was five and my mom first started teaching me to make a bed.
It was
very hard then. I was a lot shorter, so to reach the side near the
wall I had to crawl over there on the bed, which them messed up the covers. I
hadn't yet developed a strategy for dealing with these issues, but I had
listened to my mom read Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. That book had a story about
teaching kids to make a bed. In that story, it was emphasized that the bed
should have no wrinkles. Probably, my mom told me the same thing. As a result, the problem of getting rid of wrinkles while crawling about was distressing to me.
Then the
thought of the likely recurrence of cancer came to mind, along with the consciousness
of the limit on the number of times that I can use this skill that I've
acquired over the course of many years, and how all the effort that I've put
into learning these little skills may soon just disintegrate.
I find
that the prospect of loss of other knowledge, like loss of knowledge of patent
law, doesn't disturb me as much as the loss of something so basic as making my
bed. Perhaps, because I was such a small
child when I first learned, this simple task seems more fundamental to
my character, to me as a person, despite the fact that it is not at all unique
or distinctive, seeing as most people in our culture know how to make a bed.
My friend T.J. Mannix posted this link on FB
Which sort of captures my feelings about my newly made bed and wondering about what will happen to it when I can't make it any more.
