I love old movies, long walks on the beach and making lists

I love lists. I do, but when I say “I love lists,” I say it like this. I’ve been compiling, composing and collating lists since before there even was an Internet, so take that, established bloggers who are taking our national penchant for the jaunty writing form and running with it all the way to big, big traffic and ever-increasing ad revenue.

The way we used to do it, back in the olden days, was much like the Amish still do: with a freshly sharpened pencil and the pulp of dead trees. My preferred form of dead trees, even today, is the yellow legal pad. But I used to buy all sorts of journals and blank notebooks to keep my precious lists. I’d get a new journal, be all enraptured by the smell of the pristine paper, the LISTS YET TO BE BORN, the thought of the book becoming ever more sentient as it grew ratty and dog-earred, how I would impregnate these virgin pages with words, my words, the book a visual, physical manifestation of the endless font of ideas that is my brain. Like in “Harriet the Spy.” Or Ryan Phillippe’s leather-bound book in “Cruel Intentions.” Then invariably I’d make a list or two and abandon the journal when a better one came along.

(See, I could never settle on just what sort of journal best represented ME. Something artsy yet accessible, purchased at the gift shop of a museum? And then, if so, which museum? One I bought at the entirely respectable art gallery in my hometown or “This? Oh, I picked this up the last time I was at the Met”? Or should I eschew college-girl affectation and be a sophisticated minimalist with a Moleskine and dark-rimmed glasses? A Vera Bradley-esque floral blank book found at an outdoor crafts fair? Levenger? Kate Spade? Just who is this Mrs. John L. Strong and what in the hell is in that paper anyway to make it so crazy-ass expensive?

I did the same thing with address books, too. Which makes the fact that I have stuck with the same Filofax since the mid-’90s a real growth milestone for me. However, I am on year three of trying to decide on a binder/some other method to hold my printed-from-the-Web recipes.)

So, yeah, I’m all about Anna’s Listlessness Monday thing. Only seems right that my first post about lists is a list of some of the classic lists of all time. Historic moments in the history of lists, if you will.

1. Things I Do Better Than Anyone I Know. Could have been an assigned writing exercise for a class in college, but more likely a lame self-esteem boost. This list was written in a fine felt-tip pen (the pens! Almost as important as the journal itself) on unlined pages, which never turned out well. It included “make homemade brownies,” because it’s empirical fact. It also included something that proper young ladies should never brag about being good at because in making the assertion, one reveals just how frequently one has practiced this activity, and with how many upstanding young gentlemen, and unless you’re putting it in a Craig’s List personal ad, that sort of thing is best not talked about. You know, because no one wants to admit to being really good at square-dancing. OK. There. I said it. (AND! I hadn’t even done it that much! I don’t even know what the boldly sexy confident woman of the world thing was about. I must have thought I was Catherine Deneuve or something.)

2. Quirky Items to Be on the Lookout for at Antique Fairs and Estate Sales. Like the vintage gold-rimmed martini glasses on the bar setup on the chest of drawers in the Venice apartment of Matt Damon in “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” Pretty much anything Martha ever has on her show or in her magazine, such as huge old mixing bowls, Depression glass. A food mill for making roasted tomato soup. Kugelhopf pans. Old issues of Bon Appetit and Gourmet. It’s all academic, though, because I don’t visit antique fairs or estate sales. Ever. I suppose “Visit Antique Fairs and Estate Sales” should go on a new list: Things to Do Once My Children Are Grown. Which would include read suspense novels, take up gardening and wear a silk scarf every day.

3. All of the Original Nancy Drew Books. (Speaking of suspense novels.) Around the time Carolyn Keene died (well, when Mildred Wirt Benson died), a reporter at my newspaper wrote a tribute that began with the question that ALL young girls ask themselves several times daily: “What Would Nancy Do?” A few of us snickered at that, because ya really think today’s tweens even know who Nancy Drew is or, if they do, give a flying Hannah Montana? Anyway, I did happen to love the books as a kid. My best friend’s mother had the entire collection, and we would spend our summer afternoons in the rustic bedroom of her beach house reading them. And then, when reading about Benson, I found out that the books I read were abridged versions written in the ’50s, not the originals. So I made a list of the original 23 titles written in the ’30s. And lo, I found four first editions in a used bookstore in a Seattle suburb a few months later. I haven’t added to my collection since, though I still have the list of books in my Filofax. Just in case. Perhaps I’ll get serious about finding more of them when Tink is a bit older.

4. Things I Need to Buy. This is an entirely practical ongoing list – one of three ongoing lists that I maintain. Things like “cardigan to go with brown trousers” appear on this list. Or “tights to go with Tink’s corduroy and denim skirts.” New bras. Purple ballet flats. A sartorial grocery list, if you will. Currently, No. 1 on my list is “jeans that will fit over my fat ass.”

5. My grocery list. Anna was kind enough not to bore you with hers, but I’m not nearly as considerate. Always: rolled oats, almonds, pecans, dried cherries to make granola for the Chef. Also, tomatoes in SOME form (heirlooms in the summer, cherry the rest of the time, canned for soups and sauce), fresh mozz, Greek yogurt, fruit fruit and more fruit for Tink, stuff to make taco salad, my go-to, crowd-pleaser meal. Things I hate to buy but buy anyway: basil. It’s a complete and utter scam. It’s good for a day and a half before the leaves turn black. Also, any Whole Foods-brand item, because you know they’re ripping you off right before your very eyes, but am I really going to drive to another store just to buy flour?

My grocery list has been a printed version. I keep a master list on my desktop, divided by store, and I would print the list weekly and then put a check by the item I needed. (This meant planning meals ahead of time.) This system only really works if you can do all your grocery shopping once a week. I found myself making Post-Its of additional items and making lots of extra trips to the store. My meal-planning system needs tweaking, clearly. I envy the mommy bloggers who do this effortlessly.

6. Hermes scarves. It sounds rather grand, I know. It’s the only thing I collect, and the list is more to keep up with the resale market. That way if I see a particular design is fetching beaucoup dollars on eBay I can pounce and cash in. Or I can pick up vintage favorites from sellers who don’t realize the value of the name Hermes. I haven’t done any buying lately, given the belt-tightening that’s going on as the business struggles to become stable, so the real point of the list is to provide a little sunshine when I gaze upon it. My usual format is title, designer, year designed/issued, when and where I bought it, colorway. For example, I’ll give you the first scarf I purchased:

Daimyo Princes du Soleil Levant
Francoise Faconnet, designed 1991
purchased January 10, 1997; New York (honeymoon)
(Hermes store was on 57^th Street at this time)
white with gold, jacquard pattern throughout

7. I was going to write about the rambling list that was the product of a drunken trip to Perkins one early morning after a night at a goth club. The list involved putting “Godlike” (a song by KMFDM, the band that gained infamy after it was revealed to be a favorite of the Columbine shooters) into various contexts, such as movie titles: “Thelma and Godlike.” Oh, how we laughed and laughed. I wrote and rewrote but couldn’t make it interesting to anyone but the circa-1991 me, so we’ll just wrap this one up with a “You had to be there.”

Quite a trip down memory lane, this entry. See all the other listy action today:

For Anna and those of you who end up here from there, pardon my templately appearance. It’s a work in progress.
 

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