Easy to finish ‘to do’ list my kinda doing them

Published 1:30 am Friday, May 20, 2022

Wendy was out of town last week, so I was home alone, or at least as alone as you can be when you’ve got five chickens and a dog counting on you to keep them fed, exercised and entertained. Fortunately, all six have low entertainment thresholds and alarmingly indiscriminate dietary tolerances, making them easy companions.

As I do whenever I am facing time at home alone, the first thing I did after dropping Wendy off at the ferry terminal was to make a list of all the things I hoped to accomplish while she was gone. Since I am still gainfully employed, most of my daylight hours between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. were already spoken for. But that still left me plenty of late afternoon and evening time to work with. My final to-do list was lengthy and ambitious. It was also doomed to failure.

My list included yard work, rototilling the garden, alphabetizing our CDs, finishing a couple of books, cleaning out my closet and t-shirt drawer, a couple of long walks and perhaps a trip to the driving range to see if I still remembered which end of the golf club one holds on to.

Like most compulsive list makers, I take great satisfaction in crossing items off my lists when they are completed. Conversely, I feel a profound sense of disappointment when I am able to cross off only a few items. To avoid that disappointment, I employ a liberal and fluid definition of what constitutes completing an item.

For example, you may recall that the past couple of weeks were pretty wet and rainy. That allowed me to cross long walks off my list on the grounds of Weather Unsuitability. Ditto any work in the yard or garden. One might assume I was able to use my time not working outside to make headway in finishing the books on my list. Unfortunately, the first book on my reading list was a nonfiction treatise about how the Irish saved civilization. Being of Irish descent, I was looking forward to the book very much. It turned out the book was far more academic than I had anticipated, delving deeply into the history and philosophy of ancient Rome and Greece. While that may be manna to some readers, to me it had the effect of literary chloroform.

After several false starts and some soul-searching, I put that book aside, but crossed it off my list anyway based on a quote from someone I’ve now forgotten who said that, “History is the lies of the victors and the self-delusions of the defeated,” and that history is merely “that certainty provided at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

The second book on my list was “The Dutch House” by Ann Patchett, which was everything the Irish book wasn’t, by which I mean easy to read and entertaining. I joyfully — and honestly — crossed it off my list.

One evening after work I stood at my closet contemplating how to most efficiently go about cleaning it. While mulling over possible closet-cleaning game plans, I got distracted by the unkempt state of a bookcase in Wendy’s office and decided to abandon my closet and instead rearrange Wendy’s bookcase. That allowed me to add, ‘Tidy Up Wendy’s Bookcase,” to my list and immediately cross it out. By then it was too late to tackle my closet or t-shirt drawer, but I crossed them both off the list anyway in the spirit of being a victor entitled to do a little lying.

At that point in the week, I needed something else to read, so off I went to Eagle Harbor Books and Backstreet Beat to load up on some books. (I don’t order books from Amazon on the theory that the sped-up culture that delivers books to your doorstep overnight is the same culture that deprives you of the time to read them). Besides, I am always looking for an excuse to run to a bookstore. And of course, I added and then immediately crossed out, “Go to Bookstore,” from my list.

When Wendy returned and asked me how things had gone, I was able to report that dog, chickens and husband were all alive and none the worse for her absence. I also shared with her my lengthy to-do list with every item dramatically crossed off. She seemed less than impressed. Admittedly, a visual examination of the house and yard would not reflect the sense of major accomplishments one would expect based solely on a look at my list. I’m already looking forward to the next time I’m home alone. Perhaps by then my closet will have cleaned itself.

Tom Tyner writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper.