Damn The Address Books, Full Speed Ahead!

I don't know how most people deal with their Address Book or if they even have one. I don't really keep a book, but I keep a computer list and print out most of it onto a page that I keep in my billfold. There's a copy of it, too, somewhere (it's here somewhere) in a 3-ring binder near my computer. The list in my billfold is entirely made up of personal phone numbers. If the house burnt down, I wouldn't have the number of Sears or Ward's or even the insurance agents, I don't think! But I'd be able to phone all my friends and relatives and cry on their shoulders about it all. If I could borrow a cell phone from somebody under 40, I mean. Older people's phones burn up with the house.

Anyway, my method's not genius, but it's simple and it works. I don't seem to know people who are always moving, so I don't even do very much updating. Maybe someone's number has changed in the past year or so since the last printout, but if they don't bother to tell me about it, what do I care, anyway?

I think of all this as being fairly orderly and organized of me. Maybe I'd score an 80 or so on a scale of 100. But apparently I just don't have enough friends and acquaintances. I've tried several times to apply some of this logic, reason, and computer expertise to my mother's Address Book over the years, but it never lasts very long. I struggle to gather all the pages and phone books that have been scribbled in, correct the old list, and reprint it. Then in a few months, I turn around and she's rounded up all the old Address Books and pages and piled them atop or inside the New book. Phone numbers and street addresses have been added by hand to BOTH old and new booklets. By now, I can't tell which are which or which notes mean what. Some may be New additions in the Old book or they may be some old handwritten additions that were superseded before the newest book was compiled. It's just confusing--to me, not her. Some of the handwritten phone numbers in both address books are a little illegible—just a digit or two that can’t be read by anyone other than the person who wrote them down.

I’d like to be able to pull together an update of her Address Book without giving my 80-plus mother the third degree, but there seems no way around it except to avoid the whole thing.

My sense of technical orderliness (as opposed to my household messiness) would direct me to gather the new or changed numbers and addresses, enter them in the computer, and print it out again. There’d be an immediate identifiable New Address Book. I’d throw all the old ones away right now, immediately. Everything would be clean, pristine, not the least bit confusing. But we have a generation gap around here, I’d have to say. I get aggravated because I can’t get all the little messy piles into a single orderly pile. My mother generally doesn’t even see the problem and get aggravated that I do. I’m not sure how long it’d be before she ever asked me to do this little job for her. Maybe never? This time I’m thinking maybe I should just leave it alone. I’m trying my best even now not to think about it, not even to bring it up. I should just leave well enough alone. When have I ever done that, though? Have you? When it comes to “improving” one’s near relations or changing how they do things, it usually proves to be something you should have kept to yourself. Unless you just like to get snake-bit once in a while to know that you’re alive.

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Read A Medium Poem called SNAKE-BIT
in JUDY GARLAND BLUES,
My Wicked New Poetry Blog for Old & New Poems

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So far the new poetry blog above has had a variety of descriptors. It has been an “Idiotic”, a “Sexy”, and a “Wicked” New Poetry Blog. Eventually I might run out of words. Send any perceptive ones that you can think of that are descriptive and yet do not embarrass me too much in either direction and I’ll use it in a future smart-aleck introduction of a poem that probably doesn’t deserve such mistreatment.

Say, do you think this is a P-blog or a Plog? I lean toward Plog. Of course, these days that may just be my poor sense of balance.

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THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: "So much time, so little to do..." Willie Wonka

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