Filing Joy

I'm pretty type-a.

I keep track of a lot of things in my life: my workouts (mileage, average heart rate, weight training days) the number of calories I consum ( to make sure that the workouts are neither over- nor under-fueled) our budget (we keep the cash we spend in envelopes, then I track our expenses and acconts and debt repayment in quicken.) I have excel spreadsheets showing what we spend on utilities and such in varying months. My books- and there are thousands of them - are alphabetized according to author and subject.

I feel like a lot of the tracking that I do in my day-to-day life is a kind of control to prevent disasters from happening-tracking is a way to keep healthy, to save money, to avoid over-spending. I know that less than constant vigilance of my accounts and workouts and such might lead to some mistake, some unexpected outcome. You could say that I don't trust myself, but I think of all this listing and calculating as a way to make sure that I follow through with my intentions. For some reason, when I write things down, I get better results.

But these mundane aspects of the quotidian aren't all that I track, because that isn't all that is important. I make a scrapbook of our year together every year for valentines' day, something I hope to do annually during a very long and happy life together. I put all our movie tickets and concert stubs and airplane seat assignments in there, along with photos of the places we went , meals we shared ,friends we celebrated with. On our honeymoon I kept a diary and wrote down what we did each day, lest this amazing time be lost in the annals of my wayward memory. I guess I don't trust my mind to hold all these times inside. But they aren't times I ever want to forget.

The other day we took a walk on a beautiful afternoon, for an ice cream cone at the shop down the hill. When we turned back, were treated to a giant double rainbow shot through a stormy sky. A mile away from home, we got trapped in a sudden(and rather violent) summer rain. We took refuge under a tree in the park for a little while, but when it became clear that the downpour wouldn't abate and we were drenched anyways, we made a break for it and ran, squealing, through the rain and the neighborhood, all the way home.

When we got home the first thing I did after towelling off was open that honeymoon diary, which was only ever half-filled on the trip , and I wrote down everything about the storm and the rainbow and the afternoon we'd had. If I'm meticulous enough to file away insurance claims and electricity bills and ticket stubs, surely, I can trap this afternoon somewhere in my well-kept records. For years from now, I will be gladder to remember these things than I will be what we paid for electricity in the summer after we were married.