It’s just getting worse. Whatever scraps of knowledge I managed to acquire over the years seem to be falling out of my head like turnips from the back of a pick up truck.
If I didn’t have kids, I probably wouldn’t even notice this terrible leak. How often are you pointedly asked where Andorra is and whether it’s really a country or what? But kids do ask you stuff like that and they expect you to know the answers. If you don’t, they start to question the usefulness of secondary education and that is a very sticky wicket to find yourself on, my friend.
When my kids were smaller, they didn’t ask questions that I didn’t know the answers to. At least, I could always make something up. And a few years from now they won’t even bother coming to me with homework or general knowledge questions because they’ll know I can’t answer them.
But right now they do ask. Especially that bookish, older one with the big hair. She always wants to understand the big picture and frankly, I'm not up to the task.
Yesterday she had homework about electricity and started asking me about polarization and what does it mean to induce something.
I squirmed in my chair. “I don’t really remember detailed stuff like that, sweetie.”
“But you took electricity at school, right Mom?”
“Probably. I don’t remember.”
“And didn’t you, like, study science at university?”
“Now listen to me. It’s cruel to make a biology major study physics. It took me three attempts to pass Introductory Physics and I still have nightmares about metal balls hurtling endlessly through space.”
“Okay,” she sighed. “I’ll look up the answers to the homework questions.”
“An excellent idea.”
“But before I do that could you please just help me understand what electricity is, like in a really general way?”
I froze.
Noonie waited politely for a moment. “Mom? Did you hear me?”
“I – yes, I heard you. I was trying to think of the best way to sum it up for you.”
I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what electricity was. Not really. And the thing is, I really thought I did. I went about my daily life using electrical appliances with the belief that I understood on a basic level how they worked.
I had to come clean to Noonie. “Upon reflection, I don’t think I understand it very well. It’s something to do with electrons moving around but I’ve never really gotten a handle on how something that’s not actually a thing can move around. An electron is a charge, they say. But what’s that? Is it a thing? I don’t think it is a thing. You’d better wait till Baba gets home from work.”
“He’s good at things like electricity, isn’t he?”
“Oh yeah. He’s actually interested in it. Do you know that he used to design and play with electrical circuits when he was a boy?”
“You mean like for fun?”
“Yes.”
“Wow.”
“And your uncle Hiss used to do the same thing. I’d find him in his room bent over a piece of board onto which he’d nailed all manner of tiny, whirring motors, miniature lights and switches. He even installed lights in his gerbil cage. Those rodents were on the grid, man.”
Noonie shook her head. “I don’t understand how doing any of that could be fun.”
“Me either. But it explains a lot, don’t you think?”
***
My crummy memory has made me an ardent enthusiast of filing cabinets. Everything goes in a file folder in my house. If it doesn’t, it’s gone forever, and I understand that.
But M works on a different system. He doesn’t forget things so he doesn’t see the need to file. Where’s the receipt for the monitor we bought last July? Oh that’s in the back pocket of my black jeans, he’ll say.
But for really important things he has a special place: his underwear drawer. This, for M, is the safest spot in the house to stash not only papers and business cards and but also foreign money, extra watch straps, ties that haven’t been taken out of the box yet, throat lozenges, phone chargers, flashlights and cuff links.
It gets a little full in there, you can imagine.
Last week when I opened the drawer to put away his clean underwear I found there wasn’t room for them.
So I cleaned the drawer out. It had to be done and I knew from experience M would never get around to cleaning it himself. (Once I tried leaving it until we moved house, thinking M would feel compelled to organise it before the movers came but all that happened was the drawer and its contents got wrapped up and transported exactly as they were).
“What happened to all my underwear?” M said the next morning. “I used to have a whole drawer full and now there are hardly any.”
I was surprised that the underwear were his primary concern. I thought he’d be worried about what I’d done with the other stuff.
“You didn’t have that many underwear,” I said. “Your drawer was just so full of other stuff that it looked like there were a lot.”
“What do you mean, my drawer was full of other stuff? Two or three business cards don’t take up much room.”
“Two or three business cards – are you kidding me? It was like a pack rat’s pawn shop in there. And just out of curiosity, when did you get the Betty Boop tie?”
“Look, I have to pack for this trip and I barely have enough clean underwear to take. Are there a bunch of them in the wash right now or something?”
“No, there are none in the wash, I just did all the laundry. I’m telling you, it was an illusion that the drawer was full of underwear. It was the same half-dozen pairs floating on top that you kept seeing.”
M frowned. Clearly he didn’t believe me. “If there really are none in the laundry then it means someone has been stealing them.”
“Maybe you’ve been forgetting them in hotel rooms when you travel.”
M whipped his head around. “Maybe the hotel employees are stealing them.”
“Uh, I think that only happens to movie stars.”
“I wonder…” he mused as he opened the underwear drawer and withdrew the pairs needed for his trip.
“Hey!” I cried. “What’s that?”
M quickly shut the drawer, pretending not to hear me, and said, “So you think that no one would want to steal my underwear?”
“I caught a glimpse of a paper in that drawer. You’ve already started filling it again, haven’t you?”
***
He had started stashing stuff in there again. Later I had a look and found not one but three different receipts, all dating from several years ago, none of them important. One was for a 3 dollar lemon squeezer from the Dubai IKEA.
I don’t know where M pulled them from. Is his underwear drawer some kind of conduit to the past?
Weirder still, we’ve never bought a lemon squeezer from IKEA and, now that I think about it, M is right – he used to have more underwear.