Answers to a Nephew--1

Here is one of the questions my nephew asked me.  Actually this is the last question in his list but I answered it first in the long email I wrote him. That explains my first sentence.

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" Do you feel rushed to complete a bucket list?”

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Let me start with your last question—a bucket list. No, I don’t have one. Years ago an older guy in the neighborhood told us how he and his wife would start travelling just as soon as they retired in two years. Then she died. He never travelled. We decided then that we would do our travelling and our spending throughout our lives and not wait. So now I don’t have a bucket list. I can think of places to go and things to do, but none of them are ‘essential.’ I won’t be lying on my death bed thinking “oh shit, why didn’t I ever…” Where could we go? Rome, northern Italy, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Lowell where the Riordans first lived in the US, Northern New York where the Palmers lived for about 150 years before they moved to Minnesota, New York City, Washington DC, the Georgia Coast, some of the great hikes in the American and Canadian Rockies. But if I don’t get to any of those, I have no regrets. I have been to most of them. What would I like to do? The only thing I can think of is paragliding in the Alps. When we were there a couple years ago we saw people doing that—the expert on top and the client underneath sailing around in the air currents. Maybe that will happen. I doubt it and if it doesn’t, I’ll be just fine. I think that the thing to do is create a bucket list when you are young and work on it. For instance we wanted to go to all 50 states. It took us about 40 years but we finally got all of them. I think the two real bucket list things I did was go to Europe (first time was when I visited your dad in Russia) and then to go to the Botticelli Room in Florence. I had a real sense of accomplishing something I always wanted to do with those two trips.