The Creative's Way to a Chronicled Life

Second Title: The Wine Lover's Calendar

There seems to be a friendly competition among humans to find creative ways to register their day-to-day activites. Aside from the boring Gregorian calendar we hang off the fridge (yawn), I'm certain that there are other forms of register that we can covet as our very own.

Some have used personal diaries (based on Gregorian system) that include an emotional characteristic. Others have used their personal checkbook to maintain a timetable. This may be useful since it is also based on the Gregorian system, but includes a monetary characteristic, bundled with emotional ties. Were we grocery shopping just before an ice storm? Were we shopping for an obligatory birthday gift? Were we using shop therapy to temporarily minimize the hostile work environment to which we're to return after lunch?

Meanwhile, I've got my own method for calculating time passage: wine corks. I discovered this the other night when I gingerly dropped a cork on the convex mound of already accumulating inside a silver wine cooler on our dry bar. Suddenly, the precarious mound spilled like the story of the last straw and the camel. This proverbial camel was accompanied by another beast of burden: a 2 gallon glass jar primarily purchased for the trove of colorfully stained reminders of dinners and celebrations together.

It was official: unless we wanted to add another ox to our beastie collection that was already crowding the bar, we just needed to begin anew -and that's when it hit me. Use the corks to verify our existence, but in a personal, unique way. They are the elements of time passage and by God, I wouldn't want it any other way.

As we separated the corks -real vs plastic- sweet memories abound through categorizing. The dinners at home that Andrew would cook or the foolish times we opened that cursed second bottle because his parents were visiting. We reviewed the first month of the year and began to count backward, removing sick time, out-of-town travelling time and evenings we just didn't drink.

Proudly clean and sporting fresh corks, our glass jar sits prominently on our dry bar, awaiting the days to include new memories over the next year. (photo coming soon).

Now we need to find new ways to use our corks crammed into 4 - 1 gallon bags resting on our kitchen island. Actually, we have plenty of ideas, we just need to find the time. I'm not heading back to the Gregorian calendar any time soon, it's a dysfunctional calculator that subtracts -it doesn't add.