The Moirai

Halloween just passed. Mabuse Manor was formerly the caretaker’s house in a Lutheran Cemetery founded in 1845. It’s a beautiful place with some soaring 150-year old oaks and poplars. This is the time of year when the leaves are falling and Madame Mabuse is counting the southbound formations of geese. The clocks fall back, and it’s full night by suppertime.

I’m currently on the downhill slope toward 70, and every Fall, when the nights get cold and the pressure drops, the steps down to the basement workshop seem to get a little bit more formidable.

When I started building my arsenal of odd gadgets some 35 years ago, I was overseeing the installation of a TelCo punch-panel in my day-job. When the workers finished, I noticed a used 1,000 -ft. roll of 24-gauge wire in the dumpster-bound pile. I asked the foreman if they were really going to throw that away and he shrugged…

So that roll of wire found salvation in my workshop. It’s still down there, unravelling bit-by-bit. My education included a lot of Greek Mythology and as I paid-out a few feet of wire on one of the first cold nights of the Fall, I suddenly recalled the Moirai, the 3 Fates, who spun, measured, and cut a thread that determined the length of a life.

I looked at that spool and wondered how much would be on it when Madame Mabuse gratefully watches it carted out of her house for good.

Life’s work, “lifetime buy”…. these terms get kicked around in technical conversation all the time, but it rather suddenly occurred to me that these terms intrinsically define FINITE phenomena, in this case, life.

There’s a lot of wire left on that spool.

I’ve always treated it as a bottomless commodity. But I’m at the stage of life wherein the symbolism of drawing out a length of it, and cutting it, makes me wonder how much will be left on that spool when the drawing and cutting stops.

How much copper did the Moirai measure-out for the life of my oeuvre, and for me?