The Joy of Lists

Some of the most satisfying moments in life come upon completing something. Anything. The contents of my attic bear mute testimony of my repeated and rarely successful attempts to achieve this happy state. There are a dozen or so half knitted sweaters, boxes of dismantled small appliances, various projects involving textiles, and many many garments with missing buttons or split seams. There are photograph albums, partially filled, and heaps of unsorted photographs waiting to be sifted into them. There are half-done paintings, and apple crates filled with tax records in no particular order either by year, type, or importance. My desk looks like an entropy wave broke on it; there are addresses on postit notes, the backs of order forms, envelopes, and quite a few in my address book, which I can sometimes find.

One day I will resolve some of these things, and I will feel uplifted. But not today.

Instead I will make a list. There is a technique to this. First you need to understand that every list should have a purpose. A grocery list, for example, should display items that you can easily obtain on your next trip to the shops. Such a list should never contain significant items such as “refrigerator” or “sports car.” Major items each need a list of their own noting important features such as “manual transmission” or “upholstery that will not show dog hair.” Also you should never include service needs like “repave driveway” or “repair furnace” since in all likelihood these tasks will involve days of telephone communication, negociation, and scheduling, and other items on such a list stand in peril of being overlooked.

It is OK to make a list of tasks such as “Muck out the attic” which you know you will never do. The purpose of this sort of list is to demonstrate how hard-pressed you are so that you have a ready excuse for not doing something else. For example, your aunt unexpectedly phones wanting you to canvas your neighborhood for contributions to her church jumble sale. You can quickly glance at your impossible list and explain that Calvin will be coming soon (never mind it is next June) and you need to clear out the attic and repaint the woodwork before then so that he can set up his electric train.

This sort of defensive list should not be confused with the purely recreational list which is typically undertaken for its own sake. Birdwatchers, for example, have been known to keep a list of every bird they have ever set eyes on. This list serves no useful purpose, is not suitable for publication, has not the slightest value to posterity, but is of intense and abiding interest to the birdwatcher. I have not heard of people who are drawn to fish or mushrooms or dogs or orchids keeping such lists but perhaps they do.

One year I kept a list of every piece of mail I received from the most exalted personal manuscripts to the lowliest grocery flyer. There were 1940 items, the overwhelming majority being junk that had to be handed straight off to the recycle. This year I am keeping a list of phone calls, an increasing number of which appear to be mendicants of one sort or another. I couldn't say for sure because I don't answer these calls any more than I read the rubbish that comes in the mail. Again, nothing useful is likely to emerge from this, but it amuses me.

But I digress.

The most important list is the list of things that you know you can realistically achieve in a day. This list should be tailored to your mental state. If you are feeling happy and optimistic, then go ahead and include something from the attic, or some overstuffed closet. Make it a short list with items like “Clean garage,” but make sure to include something you can actually finish, like “Empty the trash.”

On the other hand, if you are feeling gloomy and depressed, what you need is a really long list of achievable things like “Hang up pajamas” and “Put away blender.” You need at least a dozen such things; the more the merrier. Take the list with you as you sigh and shuffle through the day, and cross off each thing as you do it. You should feel perkier by lunchtime. If you find yourself doing something that is not on the list, finish it up and then put it on the list and cross it out. By the end of the day you should have a long list of things that you actually did, that are complete. Now you can sink down in front of the evening news in a warm glow of satisfaction, and start on the attic tomorrow.

An Appreciation of Shoeboxes

In an average year I figure I probably get about a hundred boxes that originally contained something I bought.

One spring I got a bathtub. It was a very large bathtub and came in an even larger box. It was a fine, sturdy box that I couldn’t bring myself to recycle, so I spent an afternoon reorganizing the garage, installed it upright against the wall, and filled it with rakes. The following spring I mulched the garden with it.

After that I got a new tele, whose box was in the livingroom for months because the cats liked it for a while. They also briefly like the boxes that sweaters come in, and garden gadgets, and cooking doodads. But beyond cat entertainment, they are no earthly use at all because they open on the short end and are the wrong size for anything except what came in them. Some dreary day I will round them all up and get rid of them.

I also have a vast accumulation of tiny boxes that once contained small articles of jewelry. I don’t know where they came from. I think I have more jewelry boxes than I do jewelry. It’s a mystery. Sometimes other things come in really nice, stout or attractive boxes that I keep because I figure one day I will need just such a box. Stanley Tools has a whole series of such boxes. They slowly fill with felt pens and lost buttons, pennies and paper clips.

I have a great fondness for fountain pens. I get them from mail order catalogs and various websites based in distant places and they arrive in packaging designed to resist nuclear attack. The innermost container is typically a stout, hinged box of wood, plastic, or really nice cardboard with a fountain-pen-shaped indent in which rests the actual goods, couched in voluptuous satin as if it were the finger bone of God himself. The sad truth about these attractive, well-made boxes, apart from the fact that they are too nice to throw out and therefore accumulate beyond all reason, is that they are absolutely useless beyond their original purpose of containing a fountain pen.

The most extreme example of this was a fountain pen that arrived in a cardboard box the size of an overnight bag. Inside this was a snug flannel bag in which was nestled a leatherette box that looked like an attaché case. This contained a flocked plastic liner with a form-fitting insert in which was embedded an attractive wooden box with a hinged lid. Inside this tasteful reliquary lay, in a green velvet nest, accompanied by a brass medallion, a fountain pen. I bought this more than ten years ago. The reason I can discuss it in such minute detail is that I still have every bit of it except the outermost cardboard box which long since went to mulch the garden.

In stark contrast to this flamboyant excess are all the cheesy little boxes made in China with the packing material leaking out past the staples since they can be disposed of without a moment’s pang along with the cereal boxes, milk boxes, envelope boxes, tea boxes, and plant food boxes. I almost prefer these because of their blessedly short half-life.

And then there are liquor boxes. It's true I seldom actually acquire these with their original contents, but I do seek them out when I am in the process of relocating. They are fine sturdy affairs, essential for the moving and storage of books and other small things. A good liquor box is a perfect vessel for, say, a set of dishes, artfully packed with intervening dishtowels. Some are also sufficiently seamless so that a bathroom drawer or junk drawer can be tipped right in without fear of leaving behind a trail of bobby pins or machine screws like Hansel and Gretel after a trip to Walmart. Their fatal flaw, though, is that there are no two liquor boxes that are exactly the same height or width, so that stacking is problematical. This fault eases their trip to the recycle, but some still remain, freighted with small goods that never did get unpacked from two moves ago. They are sometimes interesting as time capsules but for the most part represent a cubic foot of space that would be better applied to some current purpose.

I sometimes long for a boxless world. But then I buy a pair of shoes and suddenly realize that were it not for shoe boxes, all would be lost, both literally and figuratively. I cherish shoe boxes. I repair shoe boxes. Without shoe boxes, how would I ever find my Christmas tree ornaments, rubber stamps, camera parts, leftover seed packets, ribbons and snaps, 5-year-old tax returns, pressed leaves, computer cables and printer cartridges, glue and touch-up paint, photographs and souvenirs, sandpaper and paint brushes. They are the perfect size for almost all objects in common use. They stack well and fit nicely on standard shelves. It is clear that some thought has gone into their design. Some come with a finger hole in the end so they can be easily winkled out of a tight formation. Many have a convenient hinged lid.

And soon I will have to find a suitable pair of sensible shoes to wear to my 45^th college reunion. My plan is to make the salesman show me every model they have in the place and then pick the ones in the best box.

Headlines, January 11, 2011

I am bemused. For two days the news media have spoken of nothing but the noisy murder of all those people in Arizona on Saturday.  We can all agree it was a Bad Thing.  My heart goes out to poor Gabrielle Gifford whose life is not likely to return to normal soon or ever.  A shame Christina Green, the little 9/11 child, was snuffed.  She should have had a 12th birthday.  And the only good thing about Judge Roll’s death is that it may lead to the execution of the skin-head who killed them all.
However, to pretend it is surprising that this sort of senseless mayhem is unusual in the country that brought you Columbine and the Beltway Snipers is disingenuous at best. And the sad truth is that this sort of thing goes on all the time.  In Chicago and New York and Los Angeles.  If we hear anything about these violent deaths it will be a 2-inch summary on an inside page.  After all these are brown people and they do this sort of thing all the time, but now we’re talking about white people in Tucson.
Apparently two days after the main event there were flags being flown at half mast all across the country, and President Obama said the nation is Grieving and Shocked. Why?  
Apparently 54 Gazans were killed or injured during the month of December last year.  No grief and shock for them?  But of course they were just foreigners, so it is understandable that Fox News would have limited interest in it.
However, each and every blessed day, 100 people across the country, this country, die in car crashes, 3 of them in Arizona.  The victims of this sort of violence were also expecting to continue their humdrum lives, much like Dorwin Stoddard who was killed protecting his wife. Do we just step over their mangled corpses without a moment’s grief and shock because their deaths are so routine?  Well, perhaps.  We cannot be expected to pay much mind to some news report that says, in effect, “100 more people crushed or maimed by their cars, same as yesterday.”  Not even a more exciting report like “Only 98 crushed or maimed, two less than yesterday. At this rate there will be no further traffic deaths in only 49 days!”
The luckless Gabe Zimmerman was tragically terminated at the age of 30, at the very beginning of what might have been a successful and distinguished career, leaving behind a brother and a grieving fiancée.  59 other people between the ages of 30 and 34 also died that day.  We know nothing about them, or about the other 60 who died Sunday while the news reports interviewed people who were in nearby shops or friends of the victims or local law enforcement folk who had lots of opinions.
There were something like 500 Americans killed in Afghanistan last year.  This number does not include those who were blinded or maimed or returned to their families back in the heartland to be warehoused like a side of beef for the rest of their lives.  This number also does not include the housewives and goatherds and school children who were sent off to their 72 virgins by the mighty American War Machine as suspected “insurgents.”
This is an ongoing process and it would do us no harm to know more about it, beyond the occasional local news coverage of the return of a flag-draped coffin, the tear-drenched family at the airport, the stern, yet concerned, colonel saluting in a manly fashion while more flags snap in the background and the voiceover solemnly enumerates the many virtues of the fallen hero who is invariably fun-loving, inspirational, generous and sorely missed by all who knew him.  Slimy, brutal weasels never return in flag-draped coffins. Perhaps that is what set off the Arizona thug – no heroic homecomings for him.  Ever.
Meanwhile, while we are saturated by detailed reports of everybody remotely associated with the Tucson murders, the dead, the injured, the bystanders, the shooter, the shooter’s parents, the shooter’s lawyer, the first responders, the people in the next street  who heard the shots, the dog walker who had been there just an hour before, people who would have been there only their car wouldn’t start, while all these people are being documented and served up on the national news, there are other things happening.
For example, there must be something worth reporting coming out of all the ice and snow down in the bible belt.  And there’s the Annual Detroit Auto Show in full swing which the newshounds should be able to wring a paragraph or two out of.  
And we need to remind ourselves that there is life beyond us as well.  I haven’t heard much about the estimable Mr Assange recently, news from the Ivory Coast is thin and repetitive, the fuss in Sudan might actually affect us since we are bound to want to invade one side or another. There are huge floods in Australia, cholera in Haiti, stealth jets on the mat in China, Iran arresting vultures for spying, and yet what we hear about in vast and unnecessary detail is the late Dorothy Morris (her friends called her Dot), a retired secretary, and Phyllis Schneck who was a quilter and gave lemon curd to her friends.
I do not deny that these unfortunate people have been wronged.  I do not even begrudge them a spot on the evening news. What I do object to is the overwhelming attention paid to this lamentable event at the cost of other, larger concerns in our increasingly contentious world.

Are Cats Necessary?

There was a time, back in the infancy of biological science, when the presence of mice was explained by a process called “spontaneous generation.” The idea was that if you left a pile of laundry in the corner for too long, mice would emerge as a result. When I was a small thing we had a barn like that except what it produced was cats, a steady stream of scrawny, feral, voracious cats. This was back in an era before it was obligatory to provide food, shelter, and medical coverage to all cute animals, such as cats, bunnies, baby seals, and the like, while doing everything possible to eliminate those that are not such as bugs, snakes, bats, and so forth. So it was that this multitude of cats lived out their short, mean lives in the barn largely unmolested and untended. Which is not to say that we neglected them entirely. We did feed them. Every day they got a big aluminum frying pan without handle full of dog food and dog kibble damped down with reconstituted powdered milk upon which they fell with much pushing and growling as if they hadn't seen food in the month, which was a lie. Sometimes they would be the lucky beneficiaries of chicken bones or trimmed pork fat. While they weren't thrilled by these offerings they did nothing to dispel the notion that they would eat anything that was placed in that frying pan.
One day my brother demanded that we have a tub of Cool Whip which he had seen advertised somewhere. The rule was that if we demanded that some experimental foodstuff be brought into the house the demander was responsible for eating every bite if it proved to be revolting. We quickly learned which exotic flavors of ice cream and sandwich spreads were to be avoided, but that was after we gagged down the tub we had whined into the house. This was different though. This was so nasty that nobody in the house would touch it, including my brother after his first mouthful. My mother, a world-class nag, couldn't budge him. It was clear that that tub of cool whip was on its way to becoming a permanent resident of the freezer. Then one evening as she was draining the broth off a pot full of chicken necks and grey vegetables, my mother looked out the window at the expectant horde and the light bulb lit. For that evening's special treat they were to get the broth remains, dog kibble, and Cool Whip spread over it like a meringue pie. When I took it out to them, they swirled around my feet as usual, whining and shoving, and as soon as I lowered it to the ground they were on it. Well, near it. After a few tentative licks they backed away and looked at me with puzzled faces that screamed “Et tu Brute?” After a while, hunger overcame them and they returned to the dish and then these chronically ravenous creatures, which would eat the tires off your car, burrowed under the Cool Whip to get at the bleached out onions and celery which they porked down with abandon. In the end we had to send the residue to the dump after all.
These cats were mostly anonymous. They came to be fed at supper time and then would vanish until supper time tomorrow, or sometimes forever. We never took attendance. But there were a few that we noticed and even named such as Flannel and Schmebeth, who were cute fluffy little grey things. Flannel was run over by a laundry truck and my heart was broken. I don't remember what happened to Schmebeth. Bottlebrush was around for several years as were Boy, Girl and Other Cat who were siblings.
We had a nanny who had a thing for cats. She couldn't stand the sight of them. Every now and then we would sneak some kittens into the house under our jackets. They would inevitably be found out when they wandered out from under some piece of furniture, and the nanny would get the broom and gently (for she was not an unkind person) sweep them out the door. In any case that is what happened to Boy, Girl, and Other. We stayed friendly but they were never allowed back into the house.
I don't know where eggnog came from. In stark contrast to the bulk of the largely mud colored neighborhood cats, he was pure white and very cute as a happy young thing, although lacking the slightest interest in sleeping on people's laps or being carried around by small children, so he was soon absorbed in the ever-evolving commune in the barn. As time passed the incidence of white kittens in the area increased dramatically, at the same time that Eggy came straggling home bearing the wounds of amorous conflict.
My father was involved in local conservation efforts around this time. One project was somewhat controversial and there were loud meetings. For the most part he tried to confine his argumentation to meetings during the week so as to keep the weekends free for restful pursuits such as loafing around in the greenhouse. One Saturday afternoon he was poking around in there when a car drove in with a couple of women hoping to discuss this contentious issue. They were done up to the nines, perfect beehive hairdos, sleek pastel-colored pantsuits just back from the cleaners, accessorized with Marimekko scarves and white patent leather handbags to match their open-toe sandals. My father emerged from the greenhouse with yesterday's stubble, wiping peat moss on the raggedy pants my mother had been trying to throw away for months. He gestured for them to sit down on the director's chairs that were scattered about under the buttonwood tree. The chairs had been there long enough that the perpetually shedding tree had pretty well crusted them with stickiness and seed fluff. The visitors looked at them, appalled. One of them tried to brush off the fluff, but it was stuck down with sap. Nevertheless, they were determined. In the end they perched on the edge of their chairs leaning forward so as not to touch the back and clutching their white patent leather purses as if they thought my father might snatch them away and dash off into the barn. My father, meanwhile, had assumed the luge position on his chair and was picking at his fingernails.
From my vantage point at the kitchen window I couldn't hear what was said, but they couldn't have covered much ground before Other Cat crept out from under the boxwood, in heat again in spite of her great age, and started squirming around on the warm bricks of the walkway. It wasn't long before Eggnog staggered out from somewhere. This was toward the end of his days and one of his ears was ripped half off, he was blind in one eye, lame, drooling, and scabrous, but hormones still at full rolling boil. The visitors glanced, appalled, at these pathetic old creatures before returning to the attack with greater urgency. My father stopped picking at his fingers and sat up, interested to see what Eggy would do. There wasn't long to wait.
Other stop squirming when Eggy finally made his slow and stumbling way to her bedside. There ensued a horrified silence among the visitors while Eggy and Other noisily established the next generation of barn residents. My father watched the process with mild interest up until the visitors got to their feet and made for their car, brushing buttonwood fluff off their polyester bottoms. He then left the cats to their business and return to the greenhouse without, to my certain knowledge, ever having said anything.