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