I have a system.
I want to say that upfront, because what follows might suggest otherwise. I have a system. I keep a notepad on the kitchen counter. I own a perfectly functional pen — not the good one, mind you, that lives in my shirt pocket and is not for grocery lists — but a dedicated kitchen pen. Blue ink. Medium point. It is right there beside the notepad at all times, unless someone has borrowed it to address an envelope or underline something in a magazine, in which case it is somewhere in the general vicinity of the counter.
The system is sound. The execution is where things get theological.
Last Tuesday I went to the store for milk, coffee filters, and that specific kind of soup Karen likes when she’s had a hard week. I was confident. I’d reviewed the list mentally on the drive over, which is basically the same as writing it down, only more efficient because you skip the writing step.
I came home with sparkling water, two kinds of crackers, a candle that smelled like autumn and seemed important, something called a “snack variety pack” that I cannot fully account for, and — I will give myself partial credit here — coffee filters. One out of three. A batting average that would end careers.
The soup, I remembered, was still in the pantry. We didn’t need it. The milk I simply forgot. I don’t know what happened.
There is a particular walk from the car to the front door when you know you have not gotten what you went for. It is a walk of quiet reckoning. You shift the bags. You review your choices. You prepare a version of events that emphasizes the candle.
“They were out of the soup” is a sentence I have said, and it was not true.
I’ve started writing the list on my hand like I did in middle school before a test. It washes off, obviously. But there’s a window of about forty-five minutes when it works perfectly — which is, come to think of it, about how long a grocery run takes.
The system has been revised. It is now, I believe, quite sound.