The Vertical Phone Book
Credit my husband with this observation: We use our refrigerator more than we use our phone book.
It happened as I cleaned off the kitchen counter we affectionately call The Black Hole. Maybe you have a spot like this in your house: Everything that’s not immediately important but might be someday drifts into a lumpy pile, collecting weight and mass and requiring your full concentration to ignore it. This is where the car-insurance bill usually ends up, and permission slips for school field trips, and overdue library books.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should confess that most counters in our kitchen qualify as black holes. Stuff just piles up. The dining room table is the worst. We push junk to one side to clear a space to eat, and then when it just won’t stay stacked any higher, we break down and clean off the whole table. (Most of the stuff ends up in the officially designated Black Hole, anyway.) We eat in peace for a few days, and then the dreaded Paraphernalia Creep begins again.
As I cleaned the Black Hole, I ran across a refrigerator magnet shaped like a police car, with the police and fire department phone numbers on it. “This might be handy,” I thought, and slapped it on the fridge.
“Ah,” said my husband. “Another entry in the vertical phone book.”
Huh? He just pointed at the refrigerator.
“You know,” he prompted. “The vertical phone book.”
I looked. There was the list of friends’ phone numbers, above a list of family numbers, next to an untidy chart of doctors’ numbers. There were Post-Its for the babysitter and optical shop. Any phone number you might be inclined to call was plastered to the side of our refrigerator.
I’m not even counting the magnets yet. (There are probably 30; twelve have phone numbers or URLs, from our favorite restaurant to the 24-hour mental-health hotline.)
“When was the last time you looked anything up in the phone book?” my husband asked. Well, months, probably; anything not listed on the fridge is sure to be at switchboard.com or memorized by our numbers-savant son Andrew. (“Hey, Andrew,” we holler when we’re too lazy to look at the fridge, “what is Auntie Michele’s number?”)
Daily Bread
The vertical phone book stays mostly on the left of the fridge; the vertical calendar takes up the right. There’s a real calendar there, but most of the action comes in slips of paper with dates and times circled — the library’s show schedule, soccer away games, doctors’ appointments for three months out. I’m pretty good about keeping this sector up to date, thanks in large part to … fridge magnets. The school district doles them out every September, with a calendar of holidays, the principal’s direct line, and the absentee hotline. (If we don’t call in by noon, the school nurse calls us. She never volunteers to come help, however.) I love these magnets so much that I still have the 1999-2000 school year on there, holding up our daughter’s choir schedule. When I am truly overwhelmed by the day’s tasks, I just go stare at the right side of my refrigerator and breathe deeply. It’s Organizational Yoga.
Of course, it might be the magnets. Magnet therapy is all the rage for pain relief; maybe it calms the scattered mind, too. Or maybe fridge magnets are just so dang useful you can’t help but like them. My favorites are frame magnets: I’ll happily look at the URL for eToys a hundred times a day, since it frames that wonderful photo from last Halloween.
Of course, all these magnets were free (including the George Clooney one I pinched from a booth at FMI a few years back). That doesn’t diminish their value. Heck, put the right phone number on there, make it a fun shape, or — best of all — make it strong enough to hold five pieces of paper, and it’s a shoo-in for our vertical phone book.
Oh, the front of our fridge? An art gallery, of course.
