Lists

My mother kept lists. She had three calendars: a week at a glance, two days at a glance, and one day in grand detail. Even when my sister shoved her into the Waldorf straight from the Montreal General where she was treated for pneumonia and where my father had died the year before─“get me out of here you swine” he had screamed over and over until they gave him more morphine. He wasn’t against the morphine, he just wanted to die at home. “It’ll be easier,” my sister said, “trust me, I know her mind inside out. She won’t have to make decisions.” Which is when my sister, her telltale witch’s nose transformed into a sweet young thing, efficiently sorted, carted, and sold off my mother’s stores of her sixty-three-year married life. The only thing left for my old mother was the making of her lists.

In between pages she’d place articles for future review or to mail. Sometimes I’d receive plain brown envelopes in the mail with health tips. Nothing to dash to my bathroom floor and perform a sweetly seething rubbing-off to. Over the years, I’ve stopped and started at least one-hundred-and-twenty daily or weekly calendars. I arrive at this figure by multiplying a minimum of three calendars a year from the age of twenty until my current sixty. At first I’d select a pen with just the right flow and colour to fill in particulars having to do with name, address, phone number, and emergency numbers. And at the back, with the same smooth pen, I’d rewrite contacts and phone numbers.

I don’t want to say I’m a failure in the date book department. My mother was meticulous. Her date books were her memoirs. I always saw her writing lists, her books over-flooded with articles she felt were newsworthy. And I realize now she was my model. My own stash of papers fills a six-by-four-foot closet off my living room writing area. I see my life as an assortment of lists with various headings: houses, lovers, gyms, trainers, training partners, housekeepers, psychiatrists. I organize headings, sub-headings, shuffle, restructure, add, delete, rename. But I think houses will always be the main header. Twenty-one all in all. The subheadings saved me. I could go deep-sea diving in them, plan excursions, and create even further subdivisions, do the breaststroke through them, feeling ripples skim my chest, thighs, ass, the back of my thighs. Those subdivisions often migrated and became headings. I could deep-throat a heading and surface alive and shining.

More from Edinburgh Road:

Abie lies under our green Pontiac which is propped up with two steel girders. He’s replacing the transmission with a refurbished model, his legs reminding me of the underbelly of dead fish. “I’m a good man to have around in an emergency,” he calls out and I believe him.

“The cats are escaping from their jackets,” he says. “You need to add more grommets.” He’s doing a study on sleep deprivation and he’s going to be published and of course, he’ll continue with his masters. And the thing is these cats are hooked up to a treadmill that keeps going and going and they can’t sleep and I’m making canvas straitjackets for them. “Are you sure you should do this?” I say. “This is top level research,” he says and shows me Russian abstracts he’s photocopied. He takes me to a lab where he shows me white mice. “This one is mine,” he says and lifts off the cover. “Just keep blowing on him,” he says, “and he won’t jump out.” I carry and blow and blow and then I’m screaming, running around the table, “He’s on my head, he’s on my head,” and Abie’s laughing like a wild man.

Coyright Janice Colman 2008

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