And so it seems I've wasted another six perfectly good months, which I can pretty much say at any time, but on July 1st, the measurement of time is neater. First day of the seventh month... six months gone... yeah. Wasted.

In wondering what I've been doing with my time, I started a list. I've never been much of a list-maker, owing to some folk wisdom I heard as a child that held that makers of lists become old maids. I'm not sure of the technical definition of "old maid," but I don't want to be one. Is the term just a nice way of saying "ancient, crotchety, dried-up old virgin"? How big a group could that be, anyway? And I know it's ludicrous in the same way it's ludicrous that if you take the last cookie you'll become an old maid, but I still just want to cover all my bases.

My own list didn't develop into anything to brag about, but the act of beginning it made me wonder about the location of all my Valuable Anonymous Grocery Lists.

The Keelhauler and I are in the process of moving, having bought another boat, and my belongings are in disarray, so among other things, I cannot find my Three Essential Pens, nor my Valuable Anonymous Grocery Lists.

Something about an abandoned grocery list found in a shopping cart appeals to me, and for years I've collected them and kept them in a file, something my friends tend either to indulge or completely disdain. I'm not too proud to pull several carts out of the row to get to the one with the list in it, and the Keelhauler takes pleasure in handing me a shopping basket with a list already inside.

There's something appealing about collected theoretical groceries of a total stranger, to me, anyway. I like the odd juxtapositions that occur, the different paper people choose to write on, and the handwriting of all these anonymous shoppers. I love the misspellings and idiosyncratic abbreviations. Some list-makers are extremely specific, some oddly vague, mentioning "fruits, vegetables" but seemingly not caring which ones or how many. I imagine the shopper leaving the store with fifty plums and two heads of cauliflower. The idea can be taken to absurd extremes, which is half of the fun. For me. I realize that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for this activity.

There are two lists on my desk at the moment, found at different grocery stores. Each was written with a black ball-point pen on a post-it note, one lime green, one pale yellow. The green list writer has tall, loopy handwriting, and leaves no space between items. Her list is vague and rushed, I like to think she was with three or four unruly children, hurrying to gather components of a cook-out. "Chicken, cookies, ground sirloin, Cheese (block), drinks, water." And then, she stops to think of herself. "Slim fast snack bars, Slim fast." And then the kids. "Fruit roll ups." And back to the cook-out: "fruits, vegetables, Sour cream, Salad, Dressing, small heavy whip cream, big can fruit cocktail."

Yellow list is sparse, in neat but tentative handwriting. I think the writer was elderly. On second glance, it appears to have been written by two different people. "Roasted chicken," it starts out, with the notation "Coupon" underlined below. Then, "Mac + Cheese, Coleslaw mix, diet Coke." In a different yet still elderly hand at the bottom, is the notation "milk". I like this list for its combination of blandness and imagined crankiness, with George writing out the list, carefully reminding himself about the roast chicken coupon, and Ethel coming in at the last minute, adding MILK to the bottom as she complains that he always forgets to buy it, and how is she supposed to make the Mac + Cheese without milk, for crying out loud?

My cousin Delphine brought a list to me from Massachusetts, and I liked the abbreviation "deod" for "deodorant" so much that I've adopted it in my vocabulary. I doubt that the list writer refers to deodorant as "deod," but I enjoy to do so.

I don't know why I don't make grocery lists, as it suddenly occurs to me that in this journal, I write lists all the time. For some reason, I enjoy cataloguing and categorizing but can't bring myself to plan anything, even the items I might purchase at the market. This fear of planning could in part account for my ongoing dread that my days are spiraling out in a string of wasted moments. I can look back and see where I've wasted time, but can't bring myself to look ahead and see how else I might proceed.

milk

Star of the day. . .Lorca and Cervantes