My entire life has revolved around and been driven by lists.

Lists provide a sense of security in anxious moments and a drive in moments of exhilaration.  I can reduce anything to a chart of steps.  From time to time, I dabble in the asterisk, but a solid flow of enumerated bites sets the rhythm and sends me forward.  

I make mental lists but usually grab one of the scores of notebooks shoved in drawers and baskets, turn to an unblemished page, and uncap my favorite pen (at least, until I gave it to my son; now I settle for anything at hand).  If I get two or three lines down and think of another first logical move, I have no qualms about adding at the top, in the band of page crowning the wide-rule blue lines.  

I make Lists of Things to Pack, Christmas Card Lists, Grocery Lists, and Lists of Bad Habits to Break.  But my true calling lies in the To-Do List.

I carefully pen every step.  Beside each task, I draw a small box.  Some folks like to cross through anything they’ve finished.  I prefer the solid check, inserted with a flourish accompanied by a satisfied grin.  I’m not above adding an entry long after I’ve completed an interim step, just to make that tick which lets me know that I can move to any items that still sport empty boxes.  I like the jolt of satisfaction and the eagerness which follows, both of which I willingly relinquish for the heady sense of empowerment when I place a mark beside the last item and set the pencil beside the notepad.

In a dark period of my life, when I did not expect to survive, I broke my day into fifteen minute increments.  I made a list of everything that I would require myself to do in each fifteen-minute block.  I allowed myself to rest at the end of every segment.  After a few weeks, still breathing, shaky but sentient, I increased the period to 30 minutes by bracketing the to-do list for each of its halves.  Eventually, I could manage an eight-hour list and merge smaller tasks (“open tube of tooth paste, apply paste to brush, open mouth. . . .” became “brush teeth”).  I made it through what seemed an eternity by lengthening my lists and increasing both the abstractness and the complexity of each item of required activity.  Professional help might have hastened the process, but at that time, most of the better therapists served as my expert witnesses.  I could not bear to admit my frailty to someone whose testimony I would be having to prepare.  I used lists instead.  Somehow, I survived anyway.

Occasionally I amuse myself by creating lists of list titles in the way my friend Alan used to make a game out of drafting titles to songs he never wrote.  

• Things To Take On The Train If You Have a Long Way to Travel and Don’t Want to Make Any Friends
• Things Your Mother Actually Told You, Not The Ones You Claim She Did.
• Books You Want to Tell Everyone Are On Your TBR
• One-Line Insults to Bite Back Your Tongue Before Saying
• Places To Hide Your Stash of Loose  Diamonds If You Ever Get Any

On Friday, I found myself having to consider whether I could haul three tables out of a bathtub to access seven large original paintings that a deceased artist’s daughter would be coming to retrieve.   I thrust my walking stick aside, pushed back the door of the unused shower, and stared in dismay at the impossibility of the task.

I had never asked anyone to push three heavy tables against the artwork, which someone else had put in the tub at my direction.  Lifting the tables would pose a threat to my stability, especially given the rigid metal frame of the door opening.  Water and rust had gathered near the faucet, so I couldn’t slide the paintings over even if I could safely navigate them past a 5-gallon jug of water and three mops which I thought I had thrown out but which someone seems to have rescued.

Eventually, unwilling to admit defeat, I stood on the toilet, wedged my arthritic hip against the back wall, and locked my knees (the broken artificial right one and the bone-on-bone left one).  I slowly inched the canvases over the tables, through the gap above the shower door, and into the vicinity of the automatic accessible sink.  Every motion activated the hands-free faucet, which in turn jolted my annoyingly alert startle reflex.  As I worked, my oddest list title yet popped into my head.

Things They Forgot To Tell You About Being Single at Seventy.

I know what I would put on that particular list, but I will keep it to myself.  Too grim.  Tinged with bitterness.  Not cheerful.

Eventually, I got all of the paintings rescued and dragged to a table beside the stack of prints by the same fellow.  I dusted the edges, grouped them by size, and turned away.  I stopped, though, to gaze again at a particularly sweet watercolor of a hermit’s hut near the Georgiana Slough.  I thought about the man who had painted them during a reclusive period in his life, his family far away, separated from his wife and daughter.  He seemed to be doggedly forging an unknown but exciting path, bringing me picture after picture to add to his wall in our shop.  But then, unexpectedly, he died, younger than I am now, and, seemingly, more healthy.  I think he still had a fairly extensive to-do list, starting with finding his true north.

I left the light burning in the backroom so that his daughter would see the paintings on the table when she arrived even if I was busy with a customer.  I moved back through the suite, mentally reciting my morning chores, even though I knew the lot by rote.  

Mugwumpishhy tendered.

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®