Cobwebs in the Attic
One of the things my husband and I do at the beginning of each month is to go over our calendars. This is a new experience for us. It isn’t that we have such a terribly busy life that it becomes important to keep track of our activities. It is more of a design to keep each of us reminded of what we must do from day to day, because we found as we have gotten older, we tend to forget things. We’ve been doing it for a few months now, and it seems to be helpful … mostly.
Keeping track with a planner is nothing new for me. My working career included close to twenty years in banking, and approximately fifteen years working for attorneys. Watching deadlines is a must in those occupations. Over the years I had become quite organized and rigid with my day planners. My former bosses invested in very pricy calendars, you know the kind with leather binding, and one hundred and fifty little stickers to mark those special events. Even after retirement, I found the importance of keeping a daily (if not hourly) plan in place. I usually left it on the dining room table for reference, convenient for quick notes and references.
That simple little planner evolved into a compact-sized, multipurpose, spiral, tabbed, and colorful notebooks. I even adopted a planning schedule that looked something like the Sputnik satellite, with a circle in the center of the page, followed by arms that extended in all directions, each with a special purpose to remind me of what things I would likely forget. It took me longer to set my plans in ink for the day than it did to perform the tasks. I braved through the process painfully for a month or two, and then went back to my simple list making. My sweet husband says I’m a bit obsessive-compulsive, but I think I am just well organized. Semantics, right?
We’ve been married for three decades plus. During those years, I have been the list maker, planner, obsessive- compulsive side of our relationship, while my husband has taken a much more relaxed approach to calendar planning and list making. So, you can imagine my surprise when he said, “I need to talk to you about something…” My mind raced. What have I done? Don’t I fix his coffee just right? Hasn’t he been thrilled with my creative talents in the kitchen? What could it be?
“We need to coordinate our calendars together,” he said. Wow! It was an exciting day for me to think my overly organized, planning, plotting, and listing habits were being taken seriously. We decided to set a time (after I had consulted with my calendar, of course) to coordinate our schedules together.
Once we sat down, me with my multi-faceted, multi-purpose calendar, and he with his single page month-at-a-glance, I realized that some of the things I had on my “busy schedule” weren’t quite as important to him as they were to me. Things such as polishing nails, making a grocery list, etc., weren’t the necessary items we needed to keep track of. We also needed to have a reminder to keep track of my planner and his calendar.
The truth of the matter is, as we have gotten older, our calendars have become fuller than when we were younger and living each retirement day as we pleased. A few years ago, we asked some “older” friends what they had been up to because we hadn’t seen much of them. “Socializing,” Pat said. “We’ve been visiting doctors.” We laughed, not thinking that would be in our very distant future.
Socializing is what we are busy doing lately. Coordinating our calendars means which doctor we are going to visit, on what day, and where. Our travels have taken us as far as Tyler and even Dallas, visiting doctors. Then there are nursing home ministries, Storytime at the library, choir practice, and of course, church. Without a meeting of the minds, we discovered that two of us remembering were much better than one. We also discovered that our necessary planning sessions needed to schedule things such as haircuts, grocery shopping, and naps, all in and around our socializing.
Our planning sessions were most helpful. That is, until I misplaced my planner. Not a big deal if I had been working on one month at-a-glance page, but a three-inch thick, multi-paged, multi-functional, color-coordinated planner? That was my brain, and my very purposeful living tool. I panicked. I tore through the car, looked under the seats, pulled everything out of the trunk and couldn’t find it. I went on a mission at church to see if I had mislaid it during the vacation bible school planning. I then went through each room in the house, looking under, around and over everything. My husband would find a spiral bound multi-purpose notebook, and ask, “is this it?” I would have to shake my head, and continue my reconnaissance operation, to no avail.
In his defense, we discovered I have way too many spiral bound, multi-functional, multi-colored notebooks around the house.
Nearly two weeks went by, and the elusive brain was yet to be found. I thought of places in public where I may have left it, worried if I had written anything important that would be just a bit too revealing. Not only did it contain our “socializing” events, but it also contained snips and snippets of my freelance writing, including phone numbers, addresses, etc. Not only could I not remember what important things I had listed, I was beginning to forget what the book looked like.
We have a saying in our house regarding lost items. It’s always in the last place you look, right? I went through the house for at least the fourth or fifth time, lifting everything up, looking under everything once more. I raised a quilt off the foot of a bed, and there it was. Right there where it always was, although I still believe we have a little gremlin that moves things just for spite.
So, now, my special multi-purpose, multi-faceted, multi-colored planner is back in use. My goal is to put it in a safe place, somewhere both of us will be able to find it. And we can now set about the task of coordinating our calendars with our social engagements lest we forget.
------ You may reach Terri at P O Box 28, Center, Texas 75935 or at btlacher@sbcglobal.net