When I was five I wanted to fly. Not in an airplane – just me in my red plaid pajamas. And I wanted angel food cake as a steady diet, and I wanted an electric train like the one my cousin, Bill, had, and I wanted cowboy boots and I wanted to spend all day Sunday over in my grandfather's orchard riding around on my father's shoulders eating peaches and dribbling the juice into his hair. My entire bucket list would have fit right in my little red patent leather purse with room to spare.
By the time I was ten my horizons had broadened. I had heard of other places and had memorized their capitols. I had seen pictures of their camels and igloos and sea-going canoes. My bucket filled with longing to stroke the camels and ride the waves in those canoes. The list grew with each new thing I learned or read. I dreamt of visiting Smallville, Africa, Barsoom, Peking, Shangri-La, Australia, Narnia, New York, Pellucidar, the Rocky Mountains. I now knew, of course, that you couldn't fly without an airplane just as surely as I knew that I would never actually get to go to any of these wonderful places which were all equally real and unattainable.
My parents had been to Europe and brought back stuff, so I knew it was real, but all those other places I had to take on faith. I had seen Nebraska on the television featuring the Lone Ranger and, more importantly, Tonto, so I thought there was a good chance it was real and I could imagine myself flashing across its vast flat emptiness on a pinto pony with a hunting party of noble redskins, and I had seen Oz in a book in the library, so who knew whether the yellow brick road might not be gladdening the lives of some exotic folk in a distant highland.
As time and life moved on, desiderata were added and removed in a constant turnover reflecting new information and changes in my own tastes and resources. I gave up all hope of a cloak of invisibility and a trip to Barsoom and added instead an African safari, a trip to a coral reef. In general for everything I took off the list, I put two more things on. My poor list slowly became such a tangled mess of erasures and cross-outs it was hard to keep track of what I had included and what I had excluded. It seemed that the more I did the more I wanted to do. I wanted to travel everywhere. I wanted to speak 20 languages and go somewhere to speak them. I wanted to learn how to make things. I wanted to gain artistic skills. I wanted to have a Really Breathtaking garden.
I actually tried some of these things. I took courses in Japanese, went on an animal tour in Botswana, knitted half a sweater, made 6 or 8 indifferent paintings and some lopsided pottery, grew a lush plot of drought-resistant weeds, and finally realized that I hadn't added anything to that wretched list in a while. In fact it had stopped increasing some time ago, and was now growing smaller.
I thought about this and one day it came to me that for 20 years, the number one spot was occupied by “Move back to Canada” which had not been possible for much of that time, but suddenly I had been released and had now moved back to Canada. So now I was looking around for the new top spot and realizing that many of the follow-up projects had been achieved while I was obsessively focussed on Canada. Meanwhile air travel had graduated from short-term discomfort to full-blown nightmare. I no longer wanted to populate my house with any more half-completed crafts. There was really nothing I badly wanted that I didn't already have.
So I bundled up that ungainly heap of once-thrilling ideas and stuffed it into the wood stove and sat down with an index card to revise my list which now includes:
Have a nice garden
Learn to play Euchre
Find a reliable contractor.
I have already started on the first of these by planting a few tomato seeds and weeding the peonies, but the others? Well, 33% is better than nothing.