An activity in lieu of making resolutions

Most people are making resolutions today. I’m fiddling with a new pocket calendar. It’s one of the few ways I know to get a handle on time.

Wirecutter, The New York Times’ site, had an article on “Our Favorite Paper Planners” on Dec. 10. My calendar, made by Letts, didn’t make the list. It’s a traditionalist calendar. The company says John Letts started making these in 1812.

It doesn’t have any of the new features mentioned by Wirecutter. It does have some things I like:

• It has two “year planners,” one for 2022 and one for ’23. These are just headings for each month with a list of dates below. I use the 2023 planner as list for birthdays and other days I want to mark, including the Winter Solstice. My grandmother kept such a calendar on a nail at the old farmhouse. It had the birthdates of friends, relatives and ancestors. My own list includes Greater and Lesser Saints. The Greater are the living loved ones. I hope I can remember to send each a note this year. The Lesser are my heroes, living and dead. They are writers, musicians, artists who have influenced me. Umberto Eco, who was born on Jan. 5, is up first. He’d be on my list if he had written nothing more than The Infinity of Lists.

• The calendar has a bunch of pages that I don’t need. A lot of Letts’s customers apparently need hotel and restaurant information for Zurich and Hong Kong. I do not. But I need those pages because I paste short poems in my calendar — things to read when I’m stuck in line at the grocery store. I just made a copy of Kim Stafford’s “Citizen of Dark Times.” I’m looking for my stick of glue. If you have a recommendation for a notebook poem, please let me know.

• The pocket calendar is just the right size to hold a few index cards. The yellow ones are for notes on things I want to think and write about. The red ones are for chores. (The Wise Woman is shockingly good at recommendations.) The blue ones are for shopping lists. The green ones are for things I want to do: a book I’d like to read, a new café I’d like to try, an exhibit at the museum I’d like to see.

I am marking the new year, thinking about the passage of time. I have a lot I want to do — too much for one day, maybe too much for one lifetime. But keeping the little calendar helps.