Uncategorized – Page 139

Our worldly goods

We’re on a restoration drive in advance of our daughter’s wedding and need to deal with those pesky blemishes that stare at me every time I open the front door: the chipped paint around door handles; the holes in the parquetry wherever the dog, as a puppy, dug out strips of wood for his pleasure; the generalised clutter.

Our work began last weekend with the freezer, one of those old tucker box deep freezers that stands in the laundry.

I do not recommend such freezers unless you’re diligent, which I’m not. They fill fast with left overs and gifts of meat: slabs of beef from one of my brothers in law; whole turkeys from that brother in law’s sister; left over icing experiments from my daughter’s cake making days; half eaten tubs of ice cream that fell to the bottom out of sight and have since been forgotten and opened packets of frozen peas, broad beans and corn, all well past their use by dates even frozen.

I’d even kept a bottle of what I thought was vodka from my nearly thirty year old daughter’s twenty first birthday party. Vodka does not freeze and this bottle had been infused with fruit juice for cocktails and was therefore stiff as an ice block.

‘If anyone drank that now,’ my would be son in law said, ‘it’d kill them. Imagine all the bugs in the juice over all those years.’

I did not imagine bugs could get into frozen products but even frozen foods have a use by date.

I tipped the cocktail onto the garden after a few hours defrosting and wondered about all the space this bottle has taken up over time and all to no good.

Last weekend I tugged out the lot from the freezer and shoved it onto a skip in the front yard and then worried as it took an age for the men who had left the skip to take it back, by which time we’d had at least one unseasonably hot day and the whole thing had begun to stink. Even the flies were gathering. Then it rained.

General rubbish was the requirement for waste on this skip and I worried that dead animals in the form of defrosting carcasses in green rubbish bags might attract a reprimand; even though such carcasses would readily break down. Not the green bags though.

I think back to the days when life seemed simpler, before we worried so much about the environment we were then so blithely destroying; when I thought little about what I might have tipped onto a skip.

Now I’m mindful of waste and of recycling and my conscience never gets a rest.

They took the skip seven days later and the carcasses are gone. The deep freezer is empty except for a box of photographic paper that my husband put there in the bottom over twenty years ago, paper that came from a friend’s collection, which he had left to my husband. Paper that I understand could be precious or useful to someone serious about photography, for which reason it needs to stay in a sealed bag in the bottom of our freezer.

I have not seen this paper under its wrapper and I have no idea of its actual usefulness or otherwise. This becomes one of those situations where I take my husband’s advice blindly. Besides at the moment, this box of paper – the size of a large carton of books – is not doing any harm.

I suspect this is what hoarding is about, this clutter, this collection of items that are of no immediate use but might be useful to someone someday and so you hold onto them ever in the hope that one day someone will say,

‘Just what I needed. How wonderful. Good of you to keep it for me all these years.’

They won’t say the same of the top tier of our wedding cake, though, the thought of which comes back to haunt me now on the eve of another daughter’s wedding.

We should have eaten this cake at the christening of our first born, only there was never such an event.

Shortly after our wedding, I sealed the cake in a tin from my mother in law, a tin that sported red jacketed men on horses flanked by hounds on a foxhunt somewhere in Britain. I sealed the tin with electrical tape, which has held firm but the tin itself has lost most of its colour and the hunting scene is scarcely visible.

I hope to unseal this cake before I die but I cannot imagine when would be a good time.

That fear of doing damage to my marriage, like breaking open one double bricked wall in the house only to find behind some sort of cursed object that should not be touched or removed, or these days, the fear of running across and disturbing sheets of asbestos that could well kill us all over time.

I store the cake tin in the bottom of our pantry now, low down and hidden from view. Like my husband’s photographic paper, it takes up space, but this house can hold many of these storage items without straining under the weight because its house’s size.

And then comes the thought of moving.

Twenty years ago it did not trouble me. But as time passes, the thought creeps in: one day, within the next decade, we will need to move from a house that we have occupied as a family of six people – in time adding boyfriends, partners and grandchildren. And all their stuff.

This house is full to bursting with memorabilia Much of it will have to go, and someone will need to sift through it, to decide what goes where.

I hope it can be me. This is not a job to leave to our children, but to ensure that this happens is to think in advance.

Another wedding at least puts us in mind of the restorations that need to happen now, small ones to make the house more presentable for the occasion, and then, two more children to leave for good – one who’s away overseas at the moment and theoretically at least counts as gone, though we have a room upstairs full of her worldly goods.

There’s only one still at home before we endure our empty nest and must consider the fate of all those lucky enough to live long lives: the dreaded downsize.

Desire is the culprit

The thing about the Catholic priests, the thing that caught my attention as a child, was the extent to which they were off limits, and therefore safe to desire. At least the good looking and kindly ones were.

The creepy ones, the priests like Father Flynn who took the year nines for religious instruction, were always best avoided. Not that Father Flynn had a reputation for doing things to girls – I knew little about what happened to boys, in my single sex school, except from my brothers who talked only of ‘getting the cuts’ on a regular basis – but we all knew enough to avoid sitting alone with Father Flynn because of our discomfort at his difficult and blush inducing questions.

‘Do you have your periods yet? None of his business.

‘Do you know how babies are born?’ Why ask, unless he wanted to teach us?

‘Do you know what parts of the body are active during the procreative act?’

Father Flynn loved the word procreation and although it seemed innocent enough in the bible, at least in places, rolling out on Father Flynn’s tongue, it held a measure of salaciousness we could not escape.

And so we learned to avoid him.

My mother worried for the parish priests wherever we lived. She worried that the priest’s job was too harsh, that the loneliness must have been crippling and that the priest might resort to alcohol late at night for comfort, or some such thing.

She never talked about the priests’ sexual relations with women other than to tell me about her opposition to non- celibacy in the priesthood.

My mother needed her priests to be celibate.

‘How could I talk to a priest who might then go home to his wife burdened with my story?

I wondered then what story my mother wanted hidden from the rest of the world. What thing could she have done that was so outrageous only the priest could know.

It must have something to do with her own sinfulness.

My mother took sin seriously, or at least so she told me. She was after all raised by a woman, my grandmother, my oma, who suffered from scruples.

My oma went to Mass every day of the week, even through the freezing cold of Dutch winters, to the cathedral-like church of St Bavo, and once a week she confessed her sins to the priest.

After she had told him about the dreadful things she considered she had done to besmirch her own and God’s name, my grandmother went back home to complete her penance, a few prayers and a promise not to sin again.

Hours later she returned to the priest in his confessional.

‘You have absolved my sins father,’ she said. ‘But you got it wrong. Those sins are far worse than you realise,’ and she repeated the detail of her sins again, those anonymous sins that none of us know about to this day – we can only imagine – and again the priest remained unimpressed. But he increased his list of penance prayers so that my grandmother should go home cleansed, unburdened and ready to attend to her family and life as a good Dutch woman in Haarlem Holland between the wars.

Still not satisfied my grandmother returned yet again for the late shift at the confessional – in those days the queues for confession could be so long the priests needed to hold multiple sessions – and this time she urged the priest to take her even more seriously.

She had sinned grievously. Did he not realise the severity of her sin? Once again the priest tried to humour my grandmother by requesting not just one decade of the rosary but ten.

And still my grand mother was not appeased.

She could not be forgiven her sins; no matter how hard the priest tried.

My mother then lived under the weight of such a conscience stricken woman and tried to escape the burden by hiding herself away in books.

In medieval times, monks used scruples, the knots tied to the end of ropes and attached to sticks with which to flog themselves.

‘Mea culpa, mea culpa mea maxima culpa.’

These days we ascribe such impulses to an over active superego or to something maybe even more sinister, to some masochistic impulse to wash away our pain/sin under the weight of some bullying impulse within that gets satisfaction out of hurting ourselves.

For the monks and priests of the past – though I would not be one bit surprised if it still goes on today – it was a way of honouring God, making oneself pure and desire free in his eyes.

Desire was the culprit, desire for all things considered sinful: money, food and drink but mostly sex, lust, desire for another’s body, desire for the satisfaction of one’s own body.

My grandmother’s visits to the priest in confession might have been her way of flagellating herself. Certainly, from what my mother said, the priests who attended my grandmother felt flagellated.

The priests in my mother’s home town and at the cathedral of Saint Bavo wanted to offer relief, not more pain, but my grandmother would have none of it and the pain must have extended to her diet.

In one of his journal entries, one of my uncles, a Franciscan priest, wrote:

‘The unusual habits of mother during her pregnancy, especially in her choice of food, made her vitamin deficit and could have given her children a form of rickets as our dentist pointed out.’

For my oma, all desire was bad. Desire was to be squashed.

And yet without desire there can be no pleasurable expectation, no sense of the value of anything.

And worse still when our desires but must not even be considered.

Therein lies a problem for the priests. The need to be celibate in thought and deed.

How do you straitjacket your mind, when your mind will have its own way?

Unless you split off your desires into denial or slip into situations where your right hand does not know or recognise what your left hand is doing.