D, C, E

 Someone told me one time that the mere fact I worry about whether I am a narcissist or not means that I can’t be a narcissist. It is not the nature of a true narcissist to wonder about being narcissistic. I just googled it, and apparently that is the case. But still there is a nagging something in me saying I am very self-centered, and I need to do more about it, more than just wallow in guilt.

         When I was very young, meaning, we were still living in the house on Heinrich, and thus I was younger than 10 years old, Mom had a calendar hanging in the kitchen. It was the kind that showed just one month at a time. One day I noticed there was an initial on each Saturday in the month. And the initials repeated in a D, C, E pattern. I put on my thinking cap and quickly deduced these initials to correspond to each of us kids- Den, Clark, Eric.

         Hmmm, on every third Saturday, one of us gets some kind of attention that the other two do not. Of course, my mind leapt to a treat! I was then anxious for the Saturday with my initial to come around to see what I was going to get that my brothers did not.

         I don’t recall how many cycles it took for me to figure out the significance of the initials on the Saturdays. But I’m fairly sure I did not ask about them (for fear of being called self-centered in expecting some visible form of attention given to me on a D Saturday). So I probably just kept observing until I solved the mystery on my own. Maybe I saw Mom look at the calendar and then watched what she did afterward.

         The letters referred to whose bedsheets Mom would put in the wash that Saturday! Instead of doing everyone’s at once, she did only one kid’s sheets every weekend, and Mom kept track on the calendar whose were next.

What a total let-down in what had been a somewhat fun puzzle! I mean, could there have possibly been a duller solution?

And then I wondered why Mom and Dad’s sheets were not part of the rotation? Well, with a little more observation, I discovered Mom washed their sheets every Saturday. The kids’ bedsheets could go three weeks between washings, and the parents’ got done every week. Hmmm, good to know.

         And I think about that calendar and the tiny initials on the Saturdays whenever I change the sheets in my present world. I won’t say whether I do this once a week, or not. But the sheets are getting washed this morning, and thoughts of narcissism are wafting about.

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