Obsessive

I'm kind of ... obsessive. (I prefer that word to, oh, anal or OCD: It sounds more ... gentle?) My mother would have laughed had she lived to read that first sentence, for she (and Dad) spent lots of time in my childhood and adolescence "suggesting" that I make my bed, clean my room, do my laundry, etc.

And I should quickly say that I'm not obsessive about keeping things all that neat. One look around my study would quickly confirm that. Or my closet. Or the area around our bed (my side of it, that is).

But here are some things I am rather obsessive about.

• Reading an author's complete works. I like to blame my former Hiram College English professor Dr. Abe Ravitz for this. When he would begin teaching us about a novel--say, Frank Norris' McTeague--he would tell us about Norris' other works. The implication, for me? You gotta read these other books or you really don't know what you're talking about, do you?
• And so, over the years, I've read all of Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Poe, Jack London, Kate Atkinson, Elizabeth Strout, Robert B. Parker, Michael Connelly, and on and on and on. (As you can tell, I read not just all things by "literary" writers but by just about anyone else I start reading.)
• One source of frustration: Joyce Carol Oates. I am currently reading her new novel (My Life as a Rat, 2019), but I have not read all her collections of stories--her plays--her poems. I just don't have the time--not if I want to read anyone else. I greatly admire her--believe she should have won/should win the Nobel Prize--but she reminds me of what, oh, Dickens or Trollope would have accomplished if they'd had a word-processor.
• Doing household tasks on the same day, in the same way--from unloading the dishwasher first thing in the morning, to baking bread on Sundays, to putting my pj's in the wash on Friday mornings, to ... You see?
• Other quotidian routines ...
• arriving at the coffee shop about 6:45 a.m., sitting in the same chair (which, thankfully, the baristas save for me)--and about 12:20 p.m. for my afternoon stint
• reading my daily quota for the book I'm reviewing for Kirkus--1st thing in the morning at the coffee shop
• heading out to the health club (when my Nap Desire doesn't trump my good sense) about 1:45 p.m.
• doing the same thing out there every day: 300 cal on the exercise bike (and, yes, I'm annoyed when someone else is on "my" bike), walking a mile of laps, 250 pulls on the rowing machine, doing some sets of curls with some hand weights
• having lunch at 11:45 a.m.; having dinner at 5; having salmon on Tuesday; having an omelet on Sunday
• Memorizing poems. I started doing it back in the 80s with my middle school students (I learned the poems I asked them to learn--"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," a Shakespeare sonnet, etc.). Then, a little bored with only those things in my head, I began learning more and more on my own. Fifty, 100, 150, 200. I'm now at 230, and I hardly have time during the week to rehearse them all, though I do ...
• some in the shower
• some as I dress
• some as I walk back and forth from the coffee shop
• some at the coffee shop (silently, silently)
• some while I'm exercising (silently, silently)
• some in the health club shower (appropriately, one of those is "Casey at the Bat")

I could go on--but I have a feeling I'd better stop before someone calls 911--and the fact that Joyce hasn't called that number after fifty years of living with me is the definition, my friends, of Love.