‘What was the book where the bookcase fell over and killed the guy?” I asked Mary one day recently after having banged nails somewhat haphazardly into the shelves of our living room one that had become bowed out, thus rendering precarious one of our stores of knowledge, much of it having to do with cookery.
“ ‘Howards End’?”
“Was Howard the guy?”
“The guy?”
“The guy upon whom the bookcase fell? As in the end of Howard?”
“Howards End was the name of a house.”
“Oh.”
I had thought once of naming ours Tohubohu, as in chaos, and had indeed had a nice sign made up, to go along with one for the “delivery entrance,” but thought better of it, fearing, in the case of Tohubohu — children were still living with us then — that it might become self-fulfilling prophecy-wise.
And, lo, sign or no sign, children or no children, sloth or ambition, things will fall apart; the entertainment center cannot hold.
Mary is more attuned than I to entropy’s encroachment. It was she who decried the chaotic state of the aforementioned bookcase the other night, as in, “I can’t stand it one more minute!” — a cri de coeur that I took as a rallying cry to action. Out came the hammer, out — once I’d found some in the rusty toolbox in a dark recess of the basement — came the nails. Done with the level, done with manual art. Banging in Eden. . . .
And then they were all upon me, all the books I’d never read, including most of the heavy cookbooks, as if it were the bookcase’s admonishment for my having let things go to seed so.
But soon I had eschewed bewailing for more nailing. And finally, there it was, solid again, with all the books upright, colorful, and neatly arranged, testimony to a well-ordered life, one that was thus far winning the struggle against entropy — and an effort, albeit somewhat slipshod, that I could not help but note earned me fulsome praise for having so risen to the occasion!
Once again, all was well in my world, even to the extent that juicy D’Anjous, recently arrived from Harry & David, were being urged upon me.
And, of course, that brought to mind what the French King, Henri Quatre, was famously alleged to have said, to wit, loosely translated: “Pears is worth a mess.”