Listmaking

When the going gets tough, the tough make lists.

We've had a running file on the computer for the last three weeks or so that we call "the Random List," because it's there to catch the stuff we remember at random times with no connection to anything else.  I've put it into piles—supporting travelers, preparing house, weekend printing, Friday picnic, ceremony, reception, acknowledging gifts, post-wedding life—so that I can find things and get them done.  But items get added to the list with no respect to their weight or importance. Arranging to help find last-minute rooms for friends is on the list alongside buying Ball Jars to make iced tea; finishing our vows is next to putting a new ribbon on my hat.

What's interesting about listmaking is that the list always remains the same size.  As one event moves to completion, another arises.  And as the event draws near, even though major tasks are checked off and removed, what remains becomes more fine-grained.  "Shop for Friday," that reassuring single line from two weeks ago, is now "chips...nuts...Chinet plates...plastic forks & knives...condiments...contractor bags..."  And when I get to the store later this morning, it's going to be more detailed than that, as "condiments" gets turned into "Heinz ketchup, Plochtman's mustard, pickle relish, mayo, do we need horseradish?..."

While I'm in Poultney shopping, I'm also going to get my hair cut.  I don't know the barber's name, but I do know that although he stopped his own schooling after high school, he has a son who's in a doctoral program in physics, a daughter in a doctoral program in biology, and another daughter who's an academic librarian.  Ten bucks, no hair products, the coffee table covered with Popular Mechanics and the day's Rutland Herald.  It's like getting an oil change—simple, quick, accurate.

Poultney ought to be more of a town than it is.  It has a nice old main street, about four blocks long, with stores along both sides.  Green Mountain College is right up at the end of the street.  But everything looks half starved, like a dog with too many ribs visible.  The stores are open, but exhausted.  It feels like the same dollar moves back and forth across town, with none coming in from elsewhere.  The balance of trade is negative.  The town's local nickname is "Paltry."

Middletown Springs ought to be more of a town than it is, too, just slightly.  Although the phone book (a misnomer, really... the phone pamphlet?) shows all kinds of businesses—well drillers, furniture makers, honey growers, small engine repair—there are only two publicly accessible businesses.  One is Grant's General Store, which everyone calls Vicki's because that's who owns it and her last name isn't Grant, and the other is Sissy's Kitchen, a terrific little restaurant that only sells takeout.   Norm used to have a gas station at the four corners; he quit selling gas about six or seven years back and just ran the garage for a while, then closed the garage altogether, then the whole thing burned to the soil about three years ago.  People are used to the void at the corner now, and anything new might face some opposition.  But the town feels like it needs a "living room," a place where you can go after work and before dinner, a place to hang out when you're bored, a place where people can run into one another accidentally on purpose.  What the sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls "the third place:" not the privacy and protection of home, not the impersonality and task orientation of work, but a third place, one in which someone else does the work of being the host and all of the visitors are on casually equal ground. (The subtitle of Oldenburg's book is "Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community.")

I've made that list, too.  I know how much it would cost to open a pool room, down to the last box of chalk and the light bill.  I know how much I'd have to charge for beer, and for table time, and for lessons.  Spreadsheets are the counterweight to optimism, the clarity that's partnered with the dream.    But if one improbable thing—getting married—can make it onto our list, maybe some others can as well.