Classifying is not judging; it is not hoarding.
It should be separating without prejudice
or preference, delicious sorting without bias.
But it never is. Like when I was six years old
and loved to divide the Lucky Charms
into categories in the cereal bowl.
We only had the basic shapes back then,
in ye olden days: the orange star, the heart
and clover, the pink diamond, the yellow
fingernail moon. I diligently culled away
all the rugged little pieces of oat, eating those
first and then I sorted the rest by shape,
finishing off the moons, stars and diamonds next
together in groups of thoughtless, random order.
Penultimate were the clovers and finally the hearts
for the simple reason that leaving those soft marbits
longer in the milk would produce a scrumptious
strawberry flavor. You couldn’t help but like some
shapes better. The hearts tasted better it seemed,
an addendum bonus to the pleasures of sorting
and the milky, pink sweetness. The sorting was itself
delightful: file folders, pantry cans, words sorted
into verses, taxonomies of phyla, classes, orders, families,
genera, species, kingdoms of animals, plants, fungi
and all the single-cell fellows. I’m leaving some out—
by definition leaving some out, sorting one from the many.
But you can’t help but like some better.