Mary Roach - My Planet

It isn’t entirely accurate to say that Ed has no formal To Do list. He does. It’s just that it isn’t Ed that makes it, it’s me. It’s easy enough, as the same 10 or 12 items, mostly involving home-repair projects abandoned midterm, have been on it for years. I once wrote it out for him and put it on the side of the fridge. When I glanced at it some months later, nothing had been crossed off, though he’d added a few of his own: Make violin. Cure diabetes. Split atom.

I make lists to keep my anxiety level down. If I write down 15 things to be done, I lose that vague, nagging sense that there are an overwhelming number of things to be done, all of which are on the brink of being forgotten. Ed, on the other hand, controls his anxiety precisely by forgetting them. If they’re not there on some numbered piece of paper, they don’t exist. So there’s no reason why he shouldn’t come directly home and turn on the game. People like me really gum up the works for people like Ed by calling them during the day to see if they’ve gotten around to any of the things on the To Do list we’re secretly keeping for them.

Here’s the sick thing: I don’t really care whether Ed has done the things on this list. I just want to be able to cross them off. My friend Jeff best summed up the joy of crossing off: “No matter how unproductive my week has been, I have a sense of accomplishment.” Jeff actually tried to convince me that the adjective listless derived from the literal definition “having no lists.”

It is possible, I’ll admit, to go overboard. Ed once caught me crossing an errand off my list—just for the satisfaction. I have a list of party guests in my desk drawer that dates from around 1997. Every so often I take it out and add the people we’ve met, cross off the couples that have moved away, and then put it back in my drawer. I long ago came to accept that we’re never actually going to have this party; we’re just going to keep updating the list—which, for people like me, is a party all by itself.

My husband is the first person I ever met who doesn’t even make a shopping list. Ed prefers to go up and down all the aisles, figuring he’ll see all the things we need. The problem is that he has no idea whether we actually need them that week, and so it is that we have six cans of water chestnuts and enough Tabasco sauce to sober up the population of Patoka, Indiana, on any given New Year’s Day. It seems to be a male pride thing. “Men don’t want to admit that they can’t remember everything,” says my friend Ron. It’s the same reason, he says, that men carry their groceries in their arms: “We’re too proud to use a cart.” Ron finds shopping lists limiting. “Take M&M’s,” he says. “Those are never going to be on the list.”

Ed agrees. He says the things on lists are always chores and downers. Ed wants a To Do list that says, 1) Giants game, 2) Nap, 3) Try new cheese-steak place. Meanwhile, the polfiter sits unscrangened.

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This is a story of loss and denial.It begins in Colorado, on the freeway. I am looking for an exit called Drake Way. I notice I am hunched forward, squinting, barely going 40. All around me, drivers beam hate rays into my car. At precisely the moment at which it is too late to veer out of the exit lane, I note that the sign above me does not say Drake Way; it says Homer P. Gravenstein Memorial Highway. This is not good.

I go to my optometrist, who hesitates to up my prescription. She says that with a stronger distance correction, I’m going to start having trouble with what she calls “close work.” Apparently she has mistaken me for one of her patients who assemble microchips or tat antimacassars by firelight. I tell her she should go ahead and change the prescription because I don’t do close work.

“Do you look things up in phone books?” she asks. “Use maps?” She means, Do I read small print? She means I’m going to have trouble with small print. That I’m suddenly, without warning, old and enfeebled. Nonsense, I insist.

She shrugs and gives me a pair of stronger lenses to try. Then she hands me a bottle of lens drops, points to the label and asks me to read it. This puzzles me, for any fool can see there’s nothing written on that label, just tiny lines of decorative filigree. I study it harder. It is writing. “Do not use while operating heavy machinery?” I am guessing. “Now with more real fruit? Homer P. Gravenstein Memorial Highway?” I hang my head. It’s time to read the handwriting on the wall, which I can most assuredly do—provided it is neatly spaced and billboard-sized. I am old and my eyesight is going. She says to cheer up, that I don’t have to get bifocals, “just a pair of reading glasses.” In my book, reading glasses are not cause for cheer. They are cause for depression, or regression, or diphtheria, I don’t know exactly, because I can no longer read what’s in my book.