BUCKET LIST

So the last five years and particularly since I have met Pat, I am working on my bucket list. My wife and I seldom talked about such things. She was very content with the status quo. But the older I get, and with time marching on, the more I feel pressed to work on it. Also the more I get behind on the list, because each time I accomplish something on the list, I am introduced to five other things that weren’t on the list because I didn’t even know they existed. In the end, if this keeps up the list will be unmanageable and when someone says to me “turn out the lights the parties over,” I going to look like a miserable failure. So I have revised the ground rules for my bucket list. Nothing is written in stone and the list will be reprioritized from time to time. There is no earthly way that I have the time and money to accomplish everything my gullible mind can conceive of. Again also, and this time because of Pat, things need to be mutually agreed upon, so that might make my #1 into a #8 and vise versa or not at all. It’s something more to complicate the process.

To be fair a true bucket list has to be feasible. Otherwise it’s just a wish list and my wife’s grandma said, “If wishes’ were horse’s beggars would ride.” I always wanted to climb a fourteen thousand foot mountain since I was a kid and although that desire somewhat preceded my bucket list, if I was younger it would still be there and if I were richer I would have done it then. Now, at my advancing age, if I was a multi millionaire and I’m not, I am sure I could find some strapping mountaineer who would push, pull and drag my old butt to the top. I would stand on the peak smiling into the setting sun, with a little frost in my mustache, pull out my list and my grease pencil and cross it off. Then come back down the conquering hero, pay of the people who got me to the top and live the lie. To be fair a true bucket list has to be honestly accomplished.

There are things that were on my bucket list that I have eliminated simply because the allure wore off. I always wanted to canoe down the Church Hill River in Canada until I hit Hudson Bay and see the Belugas and the Polar Bears. Then I read some first hand accounts of those who had did it. Covered in swarms of black flies and mosquitoes. A few of them killed by the bears they came to see. I do admire people that go exploring like that but I’m not sure that I’m cut from the same cloth as they are anymore. I talked to an old Irish Man a while back at an Irish festival and he told me how he and his wife crossed the ocean in a small sailboat mind you, sailed down the eastern coast, around the tip of Florida and parked at Fort Meyers. I have to admire that kind of attitude even though the man was a grouch. He complained to me that Americans are obsessed with dying of various diseases like cancer but the Irish fear only things like dementia. “A fate worse then death,” he said, “ Is losing all of me grudges.”

I think in the end, where you have gone and what you accomplished will not be a defining factor of a successful life. It will be the friends you have made along the way and the lives you have touched and then-- to die peacefully---with no grudges

SPRING THOUGHTS

                                               

Spring is always such a fickle time. Some days it seems like Mother Nature doesn’t know what she wants to do. Get on with it, or listen to old man winter who’s still hollering, “hold your horses boys, I’m not done yet.” But for old man winter to keep his frigid sting, certain things need to be in place, but sadly for him those things are all petering out. I’m talking of subzero temperatures and wind blowing off of the frozen lakes. Too bad, but old man sun has been warming the earth and melting what’s frozen and putting the run on winter, albeit, sometimes it’s a slow process.

It’s man who is the impatient one and Mother Nature gets him going that way by all of these little teasers she hangs out there in late winter. 70 degrees and ice off the lakes in March. Rhubarb poking its pink noses out of the ground. There are buds swelling on some plants right now and a few early ducks quacking in the shallows. Seven thirty at night and its still light outside. “Shut off the television and those lousy reruns and break out the rakes and shovel’s Orville, its time. Maybe Mother nature can’t make up her mind what to do-- but I’ve made up mine.”

You watch the ten o’clock news and that goofy weather man, who’s about as accurate with his predictions as the Fed is with the stock market, is mumbling about some polar vortex and using words like straight out of the arctic and your yelling “Mother shut that damn thing off because that old fool has no more idea of what’s happening tomorrow then we do.” You go to bed all upset because that pessimistic prognosticator just wants to make waves and ruin everybody’s day. You get up at two in the morning for a bathroom break and peeking over the bathroom shutters, the yard light shows nothing but bare ground. You snicker to yourself because maybe you were born at night, but it wasn’t last night and you’ve been around the block enough times to know when winters finally over. You fall back asleep with a grin on your face, cocky and contented, just as the first snowflakes fall in the dark.

The next morning your optimistic attitude takes one right in the solar plexus. The snow shovel which was lying in the yard, is now somewhere under a foot of snow. The snow blower is dry of gas because you drained it for the season and used the gas to burn the brush pile. The plow, which takes two hours to put on the four-wheeler, is wrapped up and now safely stored behind the garage. The dog won’t go outside and why does she have to add insult to injury, with that smug look on her face, grinning over the top of her coffee cup?

It’s called a pout and you’ve used it before but never with any good results but it’s always been plan B when plan A gets blown out of the water.  It’s somewhere in your D.N.A where all of your factory settings are at. It’s your default setting, so there is little you can do about it. Oh’ speaking of water where the hell did that come from? Drip, drip, drip on the porch floor. Now I have to shovel the roof off with no shovel. To heck with it I’ll run into town and get a new one. After all it is spring and they should be on sale. What’s this at the end of the driveway? That stupid plow came by. So what now, back to the garage? No wait. I’m stuck. Rats.