Sometimes, good enough is...perfect: A caution for the holiday season

When my older sister was just a young girl, she asked the assembled adults this riddle-question: “When is a door not a door?”

The adults knew the answer, When it’s ajar, but my sister didn’t get it quite right. 

“When it is a jam pot!”, she offered in reply to her own question, then, I’m sure, giggled madly. Such fun to have outwitted the grownups! 

I don’t remember this directly, but I recall with fondness my mother’s retelling of this tale, which inspired me recently to invent the character in the short story below. Poor Clemmy, such a good heart, such a lot of not-quite-right in her life. 

***

Getting it right, but not exactly right was one of her specialities. 

When asked to contribute a salad to the potluck, she would bring a jello mould with fruit cocktail and tiny marshmallows, not the leafy greens dressed delicately with a homemade vinaigrette that was wanted. 

She adopted a cat from the local humane society but it was a sickly thing with only three legs — a cat, yes, but not a pet even with a stretch of imagination, it needed so much care — loving care acknowledged with routine peeing in the back corner of the kitchen. 

She kept a garden, feeding the soil with her kitchen scraps such that it became more a breeding ground for colonies of mice than it did for growing fresh produce and herbs. 

Clementine. 

Oh Clementine. She meant well, but courted disaster with just about every decision she made. 

Except shortening her name to Clemmy, which she declared at age 9, having decided that sharing a name with an orange was not how she wanted to go through life. That had been a good, a solid decision. And one that lasted to her final breath. 

In her later years, she had no pet — that wretched sickly cat having died after six long years of being tended to. Towards the end, Clemmy had given up on pets, on potlucks and on homegrown produce. 

By then, Clemmy focused almost exclusively on the inside of her home, filling it with this and that, nicknacks and cast offs that she roamed the alleys of her neighbourhood for, creeping out after dark, always wearing an old green sweater, regardless of the weather. The neighbours were inured to her movements; she was harmless. 

What we found when sorting through her possessions after Clemmy died — quietly and without any illness signalling the end of life was coming for her — what we found when we entered her home was at once predictable and wholly extraordinary. The main floor was stuffed with furniture and figurines, with pictures and half-burnt candles, all over, no sense of design or intention — the items just filled the space. The lone area of actual space, of room, was Clemmy’s red armchair, side table with lamp, and a pile of books that she must have thought she had ample time to get through. 

We expected the basement to be a disaster area of stuff in every corner, but it was eerily empty, just the usual appliances that keep a house habitable for the person living there — a furnace, hot water tank and a washer/dryer set that must have dated from the previous century. 

But the back room, behind the red-painted door, took us by surprise. In a murder mystery, the door might been locked and we wouldn’t have the key. But this was just Clemmy’s small-town life in the hinterlands. This was no murder mystery; she had died in her own bed. Just drifted off to leave us wondering. 

And that back room did, indeed, have us wondering, so when we opened the door not to chaos but to order, we were taken aback. 

The room was neat and organized. 

The walls were lined with sturdy shelving units and on each shelf were boxes, labeled by date and a street address. To the side was a small table with two items on it: a phone cord and a golf club. Laying open beside them was a large notebook, with a pen attached by a string. The beginnings of a list covered the right hand side of the book, while the left showed a map of Clemmy’s neighbourhood, some addresses pin-pointed by a red star. 

The list was numbered — 1,276 was the figure at the top of the open page. Flipping back to the first page in the notebook, we saw the number 913, which indicated, we presumed, that there must be more notebooks somewhere. Interesting! 

The cord and the club had, presumably, not yet been logged which was why they were on the table and not yet in a box. We determined this after opening several of the boxes on the shelves and discovering inside a motley collection of items — an old shoe, a battered book, a small handbag. One box held a collection of old glass jars, each filled with nails and screws. 

It boggled our minds to see all this. What had Clemmy been doing? Collecting garbage and castoffs from her neighbours and cataloguing it all in these boxes in her basement? That is certainly what it looked like. 

In that moment, standing in that room that was so unlike the rest of her home, I had a moment of deep regret that I had never taken Clemmy more seriously, that I had not ever taken the time to get to know her as more than just the family misfit. 

When my brothers went back upstairs, I stood quietly for a minute, then picked up the pen. 

I felt it was the right thing to do. I logged the phone cord into the list as number 1,277, the golf club as number 1,278, and I laid them beside the boxes on the shelving unit. I couldn’t fit the club into a box, of course, and I didn’t know which box the cord should go into. So these actions by me would have to do. It was close, not exactly how Clemmy would have done it, probably, but close enough. And I realized that, sometimes, close enough — even if not quite right — can be perfect. 

I murmured, 'Rest in peace, dear Clemmy. Rest in your own odd sense of personal power.'

***

As we head into the holiday season, let us keep in mind that close enough can be totally perfect when our heart is fully in it. 

This image, a 'spark' in a recent writing group,
caused me to remember my sister's door/jam jar riddle.
artist unknown

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Photo of clementines by Karolina Kołodziejczak on Unsplash