Every month, the stack grows. Another issue of Saveur. Another issue of Bon Appetit. Another cookbook or a new food memoir. I simply can't keep up. As I look at my "to be read" pile, I remember why I canceled my subscription to the New Yorker.

TS Eliot wrote a poem titled The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. There’s a line ... "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" ... that captures the weight of the passing of time, a wasted life. I felt that way the year I subscribed to the New Yorker. The magazines kept coming at me, week after week, collecting in corners, on coffee tables, on nightstands. I was measuring my life in unread copies of the New Yorker. Their advance was relentless. Their message clear. If I couldn’t manage to read one thin magazine before the next thin magazine came knocking at my door, how was I going to make a difference in the big wide world?

As I look at my "to be read" pile, I’m again feeling the weight of the passage of time. If a life isn’t long enough to get through my conglomeration of magazines, cookbooks, and food memoirs, how can it be long enough for everything else I want to do? I haven’t seen Africa. I haven’t smoked a hookah. I haven’t bargained in the Moroccan casbah. Heck, I haven’t patched that hole in my dining room ceiling. And I’ve been trying to get to Georgia Hatters for weeks to pick up my dry cleaning. 

And what of all my writing projects? The oral histories of the wives of American servicemen? Love letters to my favorite foods? My novel about dams and displaced communities? My business treatise on followership? How will I ever get those done? (argh) And you people wonder why I still haven't renovated my kitchen??!!!