Lennart looks up from the newspaper he is reading while having a late morning breakfast. He is aggravated by my presence for some reason.

"Why do you always have to do that?!"

"What?" I ask after feeling a little shocked by his tone of voice, as if he is the boss in the house not I.

"You always have to shift things around a hundred times until everything is perfectly straight."

He is absolutely right. Lately, perhaps because of a slight feeling of insecurity, unable to communicate with the older kids in a spontaneous and normal way, I have become neurotic.

I hang around and start straightening piles of papers, plates and/or cups, pencils and pens, a crooked magazine, any article with geometry, on flat surfaces with angles and sides which can be re-oriented to produce symmetry, parallel edges, converging lines, etc.

This activity has gotten so bad that I have not been aware of it. Got to do something about it soon before it becomes incurable.

My answer then, "Sorry, you are absolutely right. I will try not to do it any more."

After I grab my cup of coffee and head on up back upstairs, I realize that this promise will be hard to keep. My idiosyncrasies have gotten the best of me the last couple of months. Need to find a more efficient way to release extra psychological energy.