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If you ever want to find out what's going on in my life on any given day, just look on my refrigerator door. It will tell you everything you want to know about me, my family and even people we don't know.

With a single glance, the door tells you who is doing what, where, when and the stages of life of every family member. Forget Facebook, our lives are an open book hanging out for everyone to read on a kitchen appliance.

The refrigerator door has become the family bible and scrapbook of contemporary life, noted a friend who has been following our family over the past 10 years by the pictures, notes and the other magnetically affixed mishmash that hangs there. And, she's right.

Our refrigerator, our life

If you look at our refrigerator door right now, you can decipher we have three sons, in their mid-to late 20s. Through simple deduction, you can guess one son is married, because there's a picture of him in a tuxedo standing next to a woman wearing wedding dress.

Several Christmas card photos show our youngest son in military fatigues posing on a $25 million Army helicopter. And a third son stands in front of a large display of playing cards and dice. The pictures kind of tell you what they all do.

Through closer examination, you can tell by the receipts on the fridge we shop at D&W and Meijer for groceries, T J. Maxx for clothing and Sam's Club for laundry products and other bulk items. The receipts tell you we have cats, wash clothes a lot, drink coffee and diet soda, are well-stocked on bathroom tissue and spend a lot on Christmas but generally look for bargains.

Pizza delivery source

If anyone wants to find out about my family, they don't need to go through a tedious search of paper and electronic files, look through our garbage or read Twitter. All they need to do is walk into our kitchen and glance at the refrigerator door.

Our whole life is cataloged on that refrigerator door. You can tell what colleges we went to, what clubs we belong to, our pizza delivery source, our church, where we have to go next week, our job locations, doctors, appliance repair people and next week's dinner plans.

We also display on our refrigerator favorite relatives and their children, where we went on vacation last year, where our friends went on vacation, our shoe sizes, dates of birthdays and special occasions, favorite sports teams, lost personal items, pending bills as well as a note to remind everyone to, "Shut the refrigerator door."

Family memories

When I was growing up back in the 1950s, there wasn't much on my mother's refrigerator at home because sticky notes and magnets with advertising on them hadn't yet been invented. The only thing I can remember always seeing on our refrigerator was the name "Amana."

Later of course, my mom put up Scotch-taped notes reminding me to close the refrigerator door and admonitions that read, "Don't eat the tuna salad. It's for dinner."

When my wife, Madeline, and I got married, we started putting up baby pictures on our refrigerator so we could remember that we had three boys and what they looked like. Actually, we stuck pictures on the refrigerator because we were too poor to buy photo albums, but we already owned a refrigerator.

Over the years, the landscape of our refrigerator has cataloged the changing seasons of our lives with every picture, crayon drawing and report card.

The refrigerator door is how we keep track of our lives.

In fact, I remember once taking everything off the refrigerator door to clean it. I looked at the stark naked refrigerator door and thought, "It looks like no one lives here.

-- Myron Kukla

Myron Kukla is a professional journalist, writer and owner of the West Michigan-based marketing company WriteStuff. Kukla is the author of two books of humor, Confessions of a Baby Boomer: Memories of Things I Haven't Forgotten Yet and Guide to Surviving Life. He has also just published two ebooks on Amazon.com, Chomp andSomething in the Blood.