First on the List: Cubbing
A French staghound pack: moving off. Photo by Luna04, Wikipedia
I never thought of a 'bucket list' till the movie came out. Since then, I’ve thought of them often. Lately, I’ve come to realize that I don’t really have one. Oh, there are still the things I'd love to have done, places I've always wanted to go, successes I wish I'd had, but the desire is almost as far in the past these days as the dreams were when I had them.
Maybe part of the reason is that I'm so far beyond being one of the "women over fifty" for which SeniorWomenWeb is designed, or perhaps it's that too many of those wishes wouldn't have been so enticing to experience alone. Even a couple of years ago, when our daughter and her husband proposed a river cruise in Europe, I was astonished to realize I didn't much want to go. That had been an ambition my husband and I shared for decades, and then, when it might be possible, it didn’t seem enticing at all.
When I was in my thirties and for perhaps the next twenty years, I used to think that one day, somehow, I'd get to go to Ireland or England and go cubbing. For those to whom that's a new term, it refers to the practice of taking novice hounds out to learn how to be fox hunters in the autumn, when the fox cubs are still denned with their mothers. I thought of this as an ideal time to have an experienced hunter (horse) under me in an undemanding cross country ride in an ancient and romantic tradition.
Later, thinking about the total unfairness of attacking innocent, inexperienced babies where their dams would be their only protection with scores of dogs learning to tear them apart, I lost any desire for that item on my bucket list. I tried to work up some enthusiasm for the "drag" hunts indulged in in our part of the world, but the taste was fading fast. Of course, so was my athleticism. If challenged, I probably would have chickened out at the idea of a four-bar fence to be jumped on an unfamiliar mount.
When my father asked me in my senior year in high school what I wanted to be, I replied that perhaps acting or art. I knew he’d hoped I'd go for organic chemistry, and that it was hopeless for someone who got C minuses in Algebra. His reply was that I could do anything I wanted after I graduated from college. There went all those fantasies of modern dance, the stage, easels and painter’s smocks. I never even dared to confess that I’d like to be writer. So I was the first in our family to have a college degree, though my father already had a doctorate, honoris causa.
Since reading in childhood an exciting series of books about Navajo-Zuni-Hopi country and the people who live there, I've always wanted to visit the southwest. I don’t know if The Song of Hiawatha influenced me, but I have an abiding fascination with the first inhabitants of North America. History classes in school emphasized this. Maybe I’m just drawn to obvious underdogs with everything going against them. When I became the manager of a museum gift shop for an Indian museum, this ambition increased. I really wanted to watch the varied techniques of jewelry making depending on whether the workman/woman was a member of one tribe or another. Navajo silver is quite familiar to nearly everyone, but the wonderful Zuni 'needlepoint' and the Hopi inlays are less so. I wanted to see Pueblo potters, weavers, sand painters, beaders and quill workers. Today there is no way I’d want to venture into the tourist-crowded markets or to trading posts by myself. I salve this itch with old issues of Arizona Highways.
My husband and I both wanted to see Florence. Travels in Italy (on business) had excluded that city from his experience, and I had never even been to Europe until 1977. After his retirement we booked a place on a tour. Without going into the details, suffice to say that we arrived about 5:30 on a Saturday afternoon in Florence, and we left Monday morning before 8 in the morning. So much for that goal.
Some of the excuse for this ever-shortening list of things to do before I’m gone depends on the practicalities involved: cost, how to take care of my pets in my absence, general acknowledgment of the unavoidable shortcomings both physical and temperaments of aging. But there’s something else at work, I think, in the back of my mind. Blessed with relative good health, I find so much pleasure in walking the dog in the famous Litchfield Hills' landscape, in something like the setting sun's flaring reflection from a polished brass weather vane on the steeple of a meeting house as I drive to my son's for supper, the fabulous ability of that possum that my dog surprised under the bird feeder a couple of nights ago.
The dog was unaware for almost a minute that anything was out there, and when he noticed it and began slowly to approach, the possum fell over in a fetal curl, its teeth exposed in a rictus of instinctive behavior, and the dog (who is old and deaf and couldn't hear me calling him) was easily led back to the house. I've seen this once before, but it still amazes me. I live in an area rife with the arts, and whenever the ticket price isn't too high (and sometimes when it is), I have access to incredible music and much more.
Tonight I’ll attend a performance of Hello, Dolly at the regional high school where one of our granddaughters is singing the lead. I know how good she was as Nellie Forbush last year, and she's a year older and more confident now. All her other performances (beginning with Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz when she was nine) I've had to see on videotape or DVDs when I lived in another state at some distance away.
If there's one more thing on my bucket list, it's the least likely ever to come to pass, but I can't remove it, even though I want to: I’d love to be published by a traditional publisher just once. The days when I occasionally sold a short story (I mean I got paid for letting someone print it) are long gone. I don't much care what it is, since I've written long and short fiction, newspaper features, poetry, novels, and these essays. I look at my father's and my uncle's books on the shelf, published by Doubleday or Farrar, Strauss, or Knopf, and mentally I sigh, and maybe even salivate a little.
That's my bucket list. At least I have the wit to be grateful for its brevity.
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