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My refrigerator door is crowded with little magnet-backed souvenirs and great thoughts. I can, at a glance, be reminded of time spent in such places as Newfoundland and Scotland and be instructed by Albert Schweitzer that "If you own something you cannot give away, then you don't own it. It owns you." There are lots of cat things that warn me that they're the only "self-cleaning thing in this kitchen" as well, but that's Beverly's contribution and the oven pleads otherwise.

I have been in some kitchens, as I'm sure you have, where it is quite entertaining to read the fridge door, and the food for the mind posted thereon is as filling as any comestible inside might be for the body. There are always photos, especially in grandparent homes, but the aphorisms will also get a good share of attention. You can learn of such opinions or factoids as these:

The bad news is time flies; the good news is you're the pilot.

How can I miss you if you won't leave?

Mother said I could be anything. I chose fabulous.

Capitalists want to socialize risk but privatize profit. (OK, that's mine)

Be the person your dog thinks you are.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities (Voltaire)

We turn not older with years, but new every day. (Emily Dickinson)

Lord, give me coffee to change the things I can change and wine to accept the things I can't.

And, one of my personal favourites:

"It helps if you think of auto correct as a tiny little elf in your phone who's trying so hard to be helpful but is in fact quite drunk."

Of course, I could go on for some time with periodic trips out to my own kitchen, but you know the drill. The question for today, boys and girls, is "When do you edit the thing?"

Seriously. Time will do it for you when the photos finally curl free of the bit of tape, or the magnet gets knocked off and rolls under the fridge, but you can bring some intentional rigour to the process. New Year's Day would be a good time. The question is what to do with the edited bits.

I started a scrapbook. I know – I'm old fashioned because I actually know the word and I have one, or I made one. I'll die one of these days and someone else can chuck it, but in the meantime I can console myself with the belief that I've given the things some immortality. And if anyone is interested, there it sits in a corner of the living room. Right there by the coffee table. Wanna see my kids in grade one? Or the picture the great-grandchild drew for us on Valentine's Day?

And you don't have to get too grandiose (read "annoying") about the project. Those little 4X6 photo albums will do the job for most of your paper postings. I started one for cartoons, and now have a small (well, six-volume) library. A few are in French. 

Really. I found that I could learn a bit of the language while I enjoyed a chuckle. Then I printed off some of the best ones and stashed them in the wee albums. It was only a short hop thereafter to reviving my class-clown act and taking them in to my lessons at the local Academie Française. They got far more attention than the uses of le subjonctif. Back to you and your fridge door.

You are all out there, and you know who you are. I have visited your kitchens. Why do we do it is another pertinent question? Once upon a I-was-so-alive-back-then time, we had wooden ice-boxes, well insulated to hold in the cold from the block of ice delivered by husky fellows of the company who had harvested the winter lake and stored those blocks under sawdust. There weren't any pictures and sayings, cute or otherwise, stuck on the front that I can remember. People did the job.

I heard it on CBC and it confirmed something I had been thinking about for a while. There are people - usually of my age group but some may start the process when they are much younger - who recount stories. The same ones. To the same people. At every opportunity and at every situation that triggers a recall for them. Why?

We could also ask why have they survived so long, but that is usually a simple function of the indulgence of loving friends and family. The interviewee on my CBC had studied the phenomenon and written a book on it. Her work addressed the reasons prompting the storytellers and the common features of their stories. I'll give you the one-minute finish-your-coffee version.

Dr. Mary Ann McColl of Queen's University did the research and found there were five common features of the stories that elders told (and retold). The short text version is available at the above link, but you can listen to or read a transcript (it's #3 for Friday, Sept. 25) of the Matt Galloway interview as well. Dr McColl's book is entitled simply Ten Stories. Here's the gist.

Stories are told to:

Establish indentity (Here's me through what I did and said.)

Entertain (You're gonna love this one.)

Inform or instruct (Here's history and how I/we handled it.)

Resolve issues (I gotta keep looking at this and my part in it.)

Honour the memory of loved ones.

Matt draws out the reasons for those story retellings that Dr. McColl found in her interviews and the themes of the stories, but I was struck by an observation made by one of her colleagues because it resonated with one of my personal koans. The observation was that a deeper relationship happened when he was listening with intent.

You can't fake it, that "intent". Some of us took communication courses waaay back when, where we learned about "active listening" and the practice sessions could be real groaners at times with fixed eyeball-to-eyeball connections and attempted generation of empathic countenances and trite "I hear you saying" interruptions. But, when some of us put aside our egos long enough to actually meet the person across from us and want to know them, miracles happened. I'm married to someone who listened with intent.

And I found my own koan in the advice of one instructor who told us, "You can listen a person into their magnificence" (if you'll shut the fuck up long enough to actually listen).

Oops, too heavy? OK, here's a finish with a flourish - a page from "les blagues française" and a shot of the fridge al fresco.