180. The Packing List
An excerpt from Joan Didion’s The White Album (1979)
This is a list which was taped inside my closet door in Hollywood during those years when I was reporting more or less steadily. The list enabled me to pack, without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do. Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume: in a skirt, a leotard and stockings, I could pass on either side of the culture. Notice the mohair throw for trunk-line flights (i.e. no blankets) and for the motel room in which the air conditioning could not be turned off. Notice the bourbon for the same motel room. Notice the typewriter for the airport, coming home: the idea was to turn in the Hertz car, check in, find an empty bench, and start typing the day’s notes. It should be clear that this was a list made by someone who prized control, yearned after momentum, someone determined to play her role as if she had the script, heard her cues, knew the narrative. There is on this list one significant omission, one article I needed and never had: a watch. I needed a watch not during the day, when I could turn on the car radio or ask someone, but at night, in the motel. Quite often I would ask the desk for the time every half hour or so, until finally, embarrassed to ask again, I would call Los Angeles and ask my husband. In other words I had skirts, jerseys, leotards, pullover sweater, shoes, stockings, bra, nightgown, robe, slippers, cigarettes, bourbon, shampoo, toothbrush and paste, Basis soap, razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil, mohair throw, typewriter, legal pads, pens, files and a house key, but I didn’t know what time it was. This may be a parable, either of my life as a reporter during this period or of the period itself.
Your prompt for the week:
Write your essential packing list. What is on it? What does it say about you? About the era you’re living through?
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- Headlamps
- Power banks and charging cords
- Hand-crank NOAA weather alert radio with built in flashlight
- Bike helmet
- Water
- Clif bars
- Ziploc bag stuffed with passports, SSID cards, vaccine cards, checkbook, insurance documents, wallets
- Car keys
- External hard drive
- Cell phones
- Cats
- Bandaids
- Socks, underwear, shoes, baseball hat, raincoat
I love a list. Love isn't an adequate word. I crave, I relish, I require a list. Grocery lists. To-do lists. Lists of books to read. Lists of books I've read. Dockets of Shit to Do (because I hate the word 'bucket', and cannot append it to any of my beloved lists). Packing lists. Lists for the Go-Bag.
The Go-Bag List is distinct from a Packing List. A packing list implies vacation, adventure, perhaps relaxation and certainly anticipation. A Go-Bag List is pure dread. It's not a statement, but rather the question of what if the worst possible thing happens?
Here in old Nashville, Tennessee, tornado warnings are as dime-a-dozen as aspiring country singers. On a balmy spring day, you're as likely to hear the wail of a tornado siren as the woo of a bachelorette in heat. Before March 3, 2020, I was pretty casual about tornados. Throughout my New Jersey childhood, we sat on the basement stairs during our share of tornado watches, but the worst of the aftermath was always the puddle of drool from our poor hyperventilating terrier.
After the tornado that skirted my apartment building and flattened swaths of Nashville on March 3, 2020, I feel so much as a gentle breeze and yearn for a Xanax. At least I assume a xannie would be nice, I wouldn't know but honestly I probably should see a doctor about this. Put that on the ol' Docket of Shit to do, perhaps.
And so I've regressed. Remember when you were a kid and you threatened to run away from home at least once a week? And maybe you, like me, packed a little hobo bindle with just the essentials? And crept out the back door just to see how it would feel? I was full on, handkerchief-tied-around-a-stick rubber tramping it because that's what Snoopy did in Snoopy Come Home, and if modeling your behavior on a cartoon beagle is wrong, I don't want to be right.
Mentally, I'm stuffing that bindle with snacks and stuffies every time a cold front creeps in. Is that even how storms work? Is there like a Great Course on meteorology I could take, because that might spare me a lot of time and distress. I digress. The bindle. These days it's actually a backpack and couple cat carriers, and the contents are a little more practical. I've jettisoned Buffy, the stuffed golden retriever, to make room for real cats. I swapped out a harmonica for the dulcet tones of the NOAA weather radio tuned to the frequency of 162.525 MHz. Now we have Clif bars in lieu of the fistful of fun-size 5th Avenue bars pilfered from my grandmother's candy dish.
Running away and starting a new life sounds great when you're 6. When you're 36, stuffing everything you think you need to start over into a small backpack isn't easy, and it isn't exciting, but thanks to the Go-Bag List, at least I can get that bad boy packed in 4 minutes flat and give myself some illusion of control. And isn't that what a list is for, after all? Extracting order from the chaos, for better or for worse?
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