June 17, 2009

Dear reader,

I guess it all started when, at age 19, I read J.D. Salinger’s novel Franny and Zooey, a kooky portrait of a neurotic brother and sister raised in a brainy, vaudeville-loving Irish-Jewish family. When I got to page 75, i.e. the Lengthy Enumeration of Things in the Medicine Cabinet, well, I just about hollered, and I knew this would be a personal classic. An avid list-maker myself since my first year of high school, when I had been given a shiny new agenda of crisp, blank pages to fill with my daily thoughts and activities, I was enthralled by Salinger’s seemingly banal, yet delicious inventory. As a starter of sorts, I’ll begin this blog with said list (I might be violating copyright laws here, but I highly doubt that Jerome David will be coming round collecting royalties so I’ll take my chances).

Let me preface by saying that I’m just nuts about this passage. In this scene, Zooey, a young man and budding actor, is sitting in the family tub reading a manuscript. In walks his mother, a “fat Irish rose” named Bessie Glass, carrying a parcel.

Zooey’s voice suddenly and suspiciously spoke up: “Mother? What in Christ’s name are you doing out there?”

Mrs. Glass had undressed the package and now stood reading the fine print on the back of a carton of toothpaste. “Just kindly button that lip of yours,” she said, rather absently. She went over to the medicine cabinet. It was stationed above the washbowl, against the wall. She opened its mirror-faced door and surveyed the congested shelves with the eye—or, rather, the masterly squint—of a dedicated medicine-cabinet gardener. Before her, in overly luxuriant rows, was a host, so to speak, of golden pharmaceuticals, plus a few technically less indigenous whatnots. The shelves bore iodine, Mercurochrome, vitamin capsules, dental floss, aspirin, Anacin, Bufferin, Argyrol, Musterole, Ex-Lax, Milk of Magnesia, Sal Hepatica, Aspergum, two Gillette razors, one Schick Injector razor, two tubes of shaving cream, a bent and somewhat torn snapshot of a fat black-and-white cat asleep on a porch railing, three combs, two hairbrushes, a bottle of Wildroot hair ointment, a bottle of Fitch Dandruff Remover, a small, unlabelled box of glycerine suppositories, Vicks Nose Drops, Vicks VapoRub, six bars of castile soap, the stubs of three tickets to a 1946 musical comedy (“Call Me Mister”), a tube of depilatory cream, a box of Kleenex, two seashells, an assortment of used-looking emery boards, two jars of cleansing cream, three pairs of scissors, a nail file, an unclouded blue marble (known to marble shooters, at least in the twenties, as a “purey”), a cream for contracting enlarged pores, a pair of tweezers, the strapless chassis of a girl’s or woman’s gold wristwatch, a box of bicarbonate of soda, a girl’s boarding-school class ring with a chipped onyx stone, a bottle of Stopette—and, inconceivably or no, quite a good deal more.

And thus began my love for all things enumerated. Although my father is a meticulous list-keeper himself, going as far as jotting down his daily wakeup time, I had never before experienced the kind of poetic bliss that came over me when I first read this gem. I promptly read it again and again. I mean, how could J.D. have gotten away with that? And more importantly, how could all that stuff fit into one medicine cabinet?

Sigh. Of course I’ll never attain the level of perfection of a Salinger or a Helen Fielding, whose Bridget Jones remains to this day a personal heroine; her diary is a veritable feast for someone like me (see below for an example: the “diet” menu that threw me into a hysterical fit). My lists will vary in degrees of seriousness from day to day, going from existential, anguish-filled wonderings to my top Seinfeld episodes (that one’s coming sooner than later).

Breakfast: hot-cross bun (Scarsdale Diet – slight variation on specified piece of wholemeal toast); Mars Bar (Scarsdale Diet – slight variation on specified half grapefruit)

Snack: two bananas, two pears (switched to F-plan as starving and cannot face Scarsdale carrot snacks). Carton orange juice (Anti-Cellulite Raw-Food Diet)

Lunch: jacket potato (Scarsdale Vegetarian Diet) and hummus (Hay Diet – fine with jacket spuds as all starch, and breakfast and snack were all alkaline-forming with exception of hot-cross bun and Mars: minor aberration)

Dinner: four glasses of wine, fish and chips (Scarsdale Diet and also Hay Diet – protein forming); portion tiramisu; peppermint Aero (pissed)