If You Give Alex a Random Numbers List...

After basically ignoring me for two months, Alex has suddenly decided that he wants to socialize with me again lately. Of course, our interaction must be on his terms, and what he wants me to do is to make lists for him. While I’m thrilled that we’re on speaking terms again and that he’s being congenial to me, sometimes his list requests make me feel as though I’m a character in one of Laura Numeroff’s children’s book series, If You Give... that includes If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, If You Give a Pig a Pancake, If You Give a Moose a Muffin, and If You Give a Cat a Cupcake. The latter two books sit upon Alex’s bookshelf, and I doubt that he realizes his current behavior reminds me of the animal characters in the books, who cleverly convince the humans to get them anything they want. In If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, the mouse starts by requesting a cookie, then needs milk to go with it, next needs a straw to drink the milk, later a nap after the snack, and eventually another cookie. Alex is every bit as clever as the mouse, pig, moose, and cat, asking for something simple that leads to another and another, getting me to fulfill his wishes.



If you give Alex a random numbers list, he’ll ask for a list of random gas prices between $1.39 and $4.99.



If you give Alex a list of random gas prices between $1.39 and $4.99, he’ll remember that in 2005 when gas was about $4 a gallon, he played the video game Bosconian. Then he will want you to print all the different layouts of the Bosconian board.



If you give Alex the Bosconian board layouts, this will make him think about one of his favorite television game shows, Jeopardy, which has a board laid out with dollar amounts. Thinking about Jeopardy will make him ask for a list of how much Jeopardy contestant David Madden won each of the twenty days of his winning streak on Jeopardy.



If you give Alex information about how much David Madden won on Jeopardy, this will make him think about the Jeopardy theme song that plays when the contestants answer the final Jeopardy question. Thinking about the theme song will remind Alex that he really likes country music, so he’ll ask for a list of 100 country singers.



If you give Alex a list of country singers this will remind him that he received Alan Jackson and Kenny Chesney CD’s for Christmas gifts in the past. This will make him ask for a list of random Christmas gifts that he’s received over the years.




If you give Alex a list of random Christmas gifts, he’ll think about how cold and snowy Christmastime usually is, and he’ll ask for a list of random weather words.



If you give Alex a list of random weather words, this will make him think about the meteorological statistics, such as temperature, precipitation, and humidity. Thinking about these numbers will make him ask you once again for a random numbers list.




Although these scenarios seem—like the plots of the Laura Numeroff books—fictitious, the documents in my Word files and history files of my Internet browser will confirm that I fulfilled all of these unusual requests Alex made. Now if he’d just ask for something normal, like a (gluten-free and casein-free) cookie, or a pancake, or a muffin, or a cupcake; those are requests I could totally understand. Like other phases he’s overcome, I’m sure this one will pass, as well. In the meantime, I keep my laptop handy to make the various lists he decides that he needs.

“O Lord my God, You have performed many wonders for us. Your plans for us are too numerous to list. You have no equal. If I tried to recite all Your wonderful deeds, I would never come to the end of them.” Psalm 40:5

Saving

Before Ed and I were married, he proudly claimed that he could fit all of his belongings in his car. Considering that he was driving a Mazda GLC (Great Little Car) at the time, this was quite a feat. Since he had been a graduate student living on a teaching assistant’s meager salary, he didn’t have a lot of worldly goods to his name. Fast forward to the present, about twenty-five years later, and now we couldn’t fit all of the items from a single room of our house in that subcompact car he used to own. While we’re not even close to needing an intervention from the reality show Hoarders, I do admit that I like to keep things and must push myself to get rid of old possessions to make room for new ones. I’m always a little nervous that if I get rid of something, sometime in the future I’ll decide I need, want, or wish I’d kept it. Poor Alex has inherited this need to save things from me; his belongings wouldn’t fit in the Mazda GLC, either.

Most of the items Alex wants to save are paper-related: books, newspapers, and lists he has scrawled in his illegible handwriting or typed so that he can read them. Because Alex likes to sleep with his favorite books, many of them have covers missing along with bent or curled pages. Nonetheless, he never wants to get rid of any of his books, no matter what their condition. Consequently, we have provided him with bookcases so that he can keep his beloved books neatly and safely stored. As for his lists, we have tried various methods through the years to organize his scattered pieces of paper that usually contain dates, statistics, and other numerical values that only seem to make sense to him. Often, he would spread out these lists on the floor, poring over them proudly as he studied the information he valued, such as prime numbers or pi digits. To limit the scattered paper, we encouraged him to type his data on the spreadsheet program of his computer so that he could save this information digitally. A few years ago, when his computer suddenly stopped working, Alex’s primary panic was not the loss of his computer but his potential loss of data, and he moaned that he’d lost all of the lists he’d so carefully typed. Thankfully, the computer only needed a new power switch, and Alex could access his beloved lists within a few days. To help him organize and save all of his lists recorded on typing paper, sheets torn from legal pads, and assorted scraps from notepads, we bought him a cardboard file box in which he could store hundreds of lists. In addition, we later convinced him to write his lists in old-fashioned composition notebooks with marbled covers that securely kept his lists intact, which the legal pads and other notepads did not. These methods allowed Alex to save his lists while keeping our house neater.

Since Alex would probably save everything that he brings into the house and never get rid of anything, we have devised tricks to get rid of items he no longer needs. Of course, if we told him we were giving away or throwing away his stuff, he would likely throw a fit. Instead, we must use a technique of shifting, which allows us to get rid of Alex’s things gradually. For example, for a while Alex wanted a copy of the The Wall Street Journal every Saturday so that he could study stock market trends. Once he had that weekly edition, he would carry it around the house, sleep with it, and generally make it a crumbled mess of shredded paper from handling it so much. However, he was reluctant to part with any of these newspapers and would have been upset had we suggested throwing them away or putting them in the recycle bin. After Alex would go to sleep, Ed or I would grab the oldest editions of the The Wall Street Journal, leaving the newer and less tattered ones where he could find them, and put them in the garage or the basement. We were afraid to get rid of them completely, for fear that Alex would be angry that we had taken his precious belongings, so we put them in a holding place where he wouldn’t see them. Had he asked for a specific one, we could still get it for him. After several weeks passed and we felt certain he no longer missed those papers, then we would hide them in the garbage to get rid of them for good. Similarly, we used the shifting technique with old toys, sending them over to my parents’ house, where the grandkids could play with them there. If Alex showed an interest in playing with his old toys there, we kept them, but if he ignored them, we would give them to Goodwill after we were certain he wouldn’t want them again. Over the years, this shifting method worked very well to help Alex sort through the possessions he thought he needed and wanted to save. Had we allowed him to save everything, we might have been candidates for Hoarders, indeed. While he doesn’t need to limit his possessions to those that would fit in a small car, keeping clutter to a minimum is something Alex will need to learn eventually.

“May Your ways be known throughout the earth, Your saving power among people everywhere.” Psalm 67:2