I’m getting organized. You?

Most of us get organized from time to time. For some that means their files, for others their kitchen, for others closets, accounts, schedules. For Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’ haunting play, it meant her glass menagerie. For me it’s my words. My journals march across my shelf like parade-ground cadets. They’re not kidding – so don’t mess with them – you he’uh! I don’t bother imposing order elsewhere. (Bless Jane for this and all!) I forget birthdays and confuse appointments. From time to time, I alphabetize my spice rack – good luck with that. I used to keep my record, then CD, collections with finicky assiduity; now Spotify organizes all my music (and yours) at a miraculous click for a few bucks a month.

Organization is, of course, a notion, not a measurable condition. One person’s order is another’s chaos. I consider my shoes amply organized in my closet; others (preposterously) see a heap. “How can you live that way!” I’ve been asked, aghast. “How can you fail to memorialize in prissy prose your every waking moment!” I refrain from retorting.

While other creatures organize – their habitats, schedules, larders – we can usually see why. It’s to survive, thrive. The utility of Laura’s menagerie or my journals – or a shoe collection if you can believe it – may be harder to discern. It is not our stuff we’re organizing – not really – but the contents of our skulls, for which these practicalities are proxies. We are fulfilling a mysterious, typically inarticulate pact: If I maintain order here, O You Most High, will you let me be? “These fragments have a shored against my ruins.”

Religion organizes and harmonizes supplication. We gather in our negotiations with the Almighty like workers into unions, as if there was strength in numbers. Who dares address God one on one! Among my sports is going toe to toe with God – but that’s just me. Others rate berating the deity blasphemy.

Where you have organized, there shall your heart be also. My mother was obsessed with the contents of drawers. My sock drawer crazed her. If I couldn’t keep my socks neatly twinned and aligned, what would become of me! Naturally enough (you may have seen this coming), I introduced disorder into my sock drawer to get her goat. In prep school, a bachelor master kept on his mantle a model of his World War Two battleship, chugging from left to right. Naturally enough, vicious students would sneak into the master’s study and reverse the battleship’s direction, causing the poor man to explode like an overheated pressure cooker. I did not find such cruelty funny – then or now. Perhaps I too felt my inner order brittle.

Henry worries little about getting organized. He wakes organized. His paws, appetites, and chew-toys are where he left them, and if not, no big whoops. Only that’s not quite true. His equanimity depends on the predictability of his leaders’ patterns. At six he licks me awake, at eleven we walk, at five his main meal, and if we vary from these routines, Henry yips and ricochets frantically. “What in blazes is going on!” his gestures plead. His world is falling apart. His battleship is chugging in the wrong direction. The unicorn in his menagerie has shattered.

The enemy of organization is disorder, chaos, meaninglessness, death, our perpetual predator and eventual destroyer. We array our arrangements against erasure like sandbanks against a rising river. My mother’s socks and these daily missives are similarly prayerful.