The passage of a human life can be marked in many ways. One of the ubiquitous ways is beginnings and endings. From the first day at school to graduation from university, from launching a new career to retiring from work, the map of our lives can be seen as a series of beginnings and endings.

At some point in life, it may dawn on you that you are reaching the point where most of your beginnings are behind you, and what lies ahead of you is almost all endings. Please don’t think that I am feeling morbid today; on the contrary, endings can be very satisfying indeed. I still remember with a warm glow the day when Bernice and I made the last payment on our mortgage, although probably, if I had to choose one ending that soared above all others, it would be the day Bernice and I walked out of the kids’ high school one evening, turned to each other, and declared: “That is the last parents’ evening we will ever have to attend.”

It may surprise you to learn that Michael’s relationship with school, indeed his relationship with any institutional authority, was, shall we say, fraught, (arguably more for us than for him) and, for me even more than for his always understanding and always self-assured mother, parents’ evenings were one of the inner circles of hell.

Nothing has quite matched that feeling but there has been another major element in our shared life that has, on occasion, elicited the same kind of emotions as I felt sitting across the desk from Micha’el’s teachers. That is, unexpectedly, our house. Let me explain.

Bernice and I are very fond of our house. We have, over the years, nurtured it and lavished attention on it, and almost all of the time it repays us by being a haven of peace and comfort which accommodates our various idiosyncrasies and our accumulated junk uncomplainingly.

However! Every so often, the house misbehaves. Take last Friday, for example. (It is, incidentally, always a Friday, though not always just a week before we are going away for 11 days.) Bernice had put a wash on, and the machine was ticking and humming quietly to itself, the soothing sound of water lazily slapping the sides of the drum interrupted by an occasional chirp to mark the machine’s steady and serene procession through the various phases of the wash.

Suddenly, this calm was interrupted by the unmistakable buzz of electricity shorting. In a fusillade of short chirrups, the machine switched itself off and on repeatedly. The buzzing and chirping continued for a short while, until Bernice wisely decided to switch off and unplug the machine, which had, anyway, finished its cycle except for spinning, and to hang up the sodden washing.

Our washing machine lives in our utility room. This is a room of which I am immensely proud. It is about 1.80 x 1.70 metres, with a door that opens inwards. A circular vent from the adjacent under-the-stairs toilet is cut into one wall. There are no windows and two electric sockets, on opposite walls. Not long after we moved in, we bought in IKEA some free-standing wooden open utility shelving units, in the form of upright poles and shelves. We were able to buy a combination of units that gave us shelving along two adjacent walls, and a single unit on a third wall. This left a space for standing slightly less than 1.30 x 1.00 metres.

We managed to fit the washing machine between the uprights of the single unit, opposite the door, and, between that unit and the L-shaped unit, a small upright freezer, with a small upright fridge standing on top of it.

The shelving unit holds household supplies, tools, cleaning equipment, our emergency supplies in case of war (the utility room also doubles as our improvised ‘safe’ room, in the event of missile or rocket attack), about 60 beer bottles (sometimes full, sometimes empty) for home brewing, a shopping wheelie bag, laundry baskets, buckets, plastic bag dispensers, our Shabbat plata and urn, and a lot of other stuff…and I mean a lot. The room is a shrine to the efficient use of space. However, there is one drawback.

In order to access the electricity socket, in the event, for example, that it burns out, as it had last Friday, a certain amount of rearrangement of the furniture is required. The socket is 70cm above floor level, behind the stacked fridge and freezer.

So, on Friday, Bernice and I had to empty the fridge, then lift the fridge off the freezer, put it down on the floor, and slide it out of the utility room. This is an exercise made more challenging by the fact that the utility room is only just large enough for two people to stand in, and, when there are two people standing in it, there is no available floor space to put the fridge down. Imagine, if you will, a game of Twister played in a retirement home, with the participants required to carry heavy weights throughout the game, and you will have some idea of what we went through.

When we had eventually extricated the fridge and freezer, we could see the charred socket. It made no sense to put anything back until the socket was replaced, and that wasn’t going to happen before Shabbat, so we then repacked the fridge, plugged it in in the salon, slid the freezer out, left that in the hall, plugged in via an extension lead, and called our electrician and explained the problem to him. Quick as a flash, there I was back at the parents’ evening. He started pointing out how far short of the safety protocol our house’s electricity falls, and how haphazardly it was wired in the years before we moved in. He then castigated us for overloading the system.

Once he had humiliated us in this way, he then admitted that what we would need to do to replace the house’s wiring and upgrade to a three-phase circuit would be prohibitively expensive, and he quite understood why nobody is ever prepared to do it. As if this kindness were not enough, when he arrived on Sunday to carry out the work of removing the burnt-out socket and channelling cables from the junction box to a new four-socket outlet that he mounted in an accessible position on the wall, I was able to show him that I had reformed my ways since his last humiliation a few months ago, and I had labelled all twelve of the circuit-breakers in our electricity box, mapping each to its respective lights and sockets. He was suitably impressed.

Once the electrician had finished, cleaned up, and left, Bernice and I then had another long game of Twister (it is even more challenging in a confined space to lift a fridge onto a freezer than to take a fridge off a freezer), and eventually managed to get the utility room back into shape. Now, we are left waiting for the next unexpected domestic crisis (usually either electricity- or water-based), reminding us, yet again, that our house is capable of acting not only like a non-conformist child, but also like an aging parent, suddenly developing some new system malfunction that requires immediate attention.

It is with a shock that I now realise that, while I was looking in the other direction, I transformed from the son whose parents’ health is an increasing cause of concern into the father whose health is an increasing cause of concern for his children. I suppose that is just another way in which we mark the transition from a life full of beginnings to one increasingly marked by endings. And on that memento mori note, I wish you a good week, untroubled by any health or other issues.