Bucket List Stuff

Well, check another one off the bucket list.  Something I've wanted to do for nearly 40 years has finally happened:  I had lunch with my mother and with her step-daughter.  I mentioned a few weeks back about my disappointment that after my mother and her second husband married in 1975 I never got to know his grown children and my kids didn't have the opportunity to have "cousins" since they were all roughly in the same age range.

But, as my mother says, "that was a long time ago" and proving that it's never too late to start over, his daughter Ellen and I spoke at her brother's funeral recently about how we should get together with my mother some time.

Yesterday was the day!

We both drove to my mother's house from opposite directions.   (Ellen lives about 2 hours south of San Francisco, near Salinas, where the John Steinbeck Center I've wanted to visit for about 20 years is.  She suggests that if I ever get down there, we might go together, as she has never been either.  She also recommends the Monterey Bay Aquarium which I have also wanted to see since it was built in 1984...it's where the Star Trek movie about the whales was filmed, in part.)

I got there first, since I had about 50 miles less to drive and she encountered terrible traffic going through the Oakland part of her trip.  But we were there in plenty of time to get to the restaurant by noon.

We went back to the Hilltop Inn, where my mother took me for my 69th birthday.  The young woman who seated us was a beautiful girl who may or may not be anoretic.  She was so incredibly thin!  And quite pale.  But very sweet and friendly.

It was an absolutely gorgeous day and we were seated by a window so we could look out on all those puffy cumulus clouds floating over the hills and the freeway.

We each had a vodka something...my mother and I had vodka and tonic, Ellen had a martini on the rocks...and we just sat there visiting for awhile until we finally ordered lunch.  I can never remember how many kids Ellen has.  I know about two of them, but I think there is a third but, after being a part of her family (albeit a quite distant part), I was embarrassed to ask about a possible third.    I heard about grandchildren whose names I had never heard before, who are now attending college.  My mother doesn't see Ellen and her family very often any more either, so she was shocked to discover the grandchildren are old enough to be in college.

I was able to catch up on what her husband is doing now (real estate).  The last time I knew about him, he was a drug rep, but I think I missed about 15 years in there somewhere.

We finally ordered lunch.  They had a Cobb salad but the waiter sold me on a prime rib sandwich with horseradish sauce that was absolutely delicious.

We shared a dessert, which was good because the desserts, I remembered from last time, are so HUGE you could make a meal out of one of them.

Then back to my mother's where we visited again for a bit before Ellen had to leave to go home.

I was spending the night because I had arranged for my mother to have a baseline memory test at Kaiser in the morning.  I had made pesto and we had pasta with pesto for dinner and settled in for an evening of TV (Survivor, Criminal Minds, CSI).  I zonked out as CSI started but was jolted awake an hour later by my mother poking me with the TV remote and demanding I fix the TV because she couldn't get it to go off.  I had "done something" to it and I had to fix it now because she was not going to leave it on all night. 

Well, I hadn't "done anything" to it.  I had gone to sleep with it on Channel 5 and it was now on channel 715, an HD channel (she doesn't have HD, so the picture was scrambled).  While I was trying to fix it, she was kneeling down in front of it trying to fix it from the box, which, of course, effectively blocked my doing anything with the remote because she was blocking it.   Anyway, I finally got it fixed for her and she went to bed, leaving me wide awake in the dark. 

Fortunately, I had prepared for that possibility (waking up in the middle of the night) and had my iPod and earphones with me, so I sat up for 2 hours listening to my audio book, not disturbing anyone by turning on the light.

Read the next entry to find out what happened in the morning!

Anyway, it was an absolutely lovely day and I had such a good time getting to know Ellen a bit better and I hope that we do, indeed, do it again some time!

One from My Bucket List

A couple of years ago, after I saw the movie The Bucket List, when a lot of people seemed to be making up long bucket lists of their own, I sat down to see what I would put on a bucket list.

It was difficult at first, but I finally managed to pull together ten things I would put on a bucket list, most of which will remain in my bucket after I've kicked it, but it included things like that inland passage cruise to Alaska that I've been talking about for years, seeing Iguacu falls in Brasil which my Brasilian brother Nelson has been telling me he wants to take me to, and seeing firsthand the Sheldrick elephant sanctuary in Kenya.  Big stuff.  Not likely to happen.

I didn't think about little things which were more do-able.  I should have added spending a couple of days in the Monterey area, seeing the aquarium, visiting the Steinbeck museum and eating at Steinbeck house.  That trip has been on my bucket list for about 20 years.

Today I actually did something on my bucket list that I didn't even realize was there until last week, though when I thought about it, of course it has been there.

Last week, at the end of my day at the book store, I was being relieved by owner Susan, who usually shows up about 30 minutes before I'm scheduled to leave and we chit chat until Walt finishes the beer he's having at the Irish pub around the corner.

Susan was talking about a trip she and husband Peter had taken to check out some book sales and how excited she was that she had found several copies of "Catcher in the Rye," because often it's a difficult book to find, since it was written in 1945 and not reprinted since 1951.  

I was telling her how I had never read the book and we joked about how while the book was often assigned for reading in high schools, it was not in Catholic schools because of the language, the s-word (sex) and the general negative attitude of hero Holden Caulfield.

At one point after I got my Kindle, I thought about seeing if it was available for the electronic readers, but mostly what I found were study guides, cliff notes, and one treatise which cost $36.  Needless to say, I didn't follow up.

"Catcher in the Rye" is not exactly something that is on my mind very often, but whenever I hear about it, like in a Jeopardy question or somebody mentioning it in passing, assuming the of course everybody has read "Catcher in the Rye."

Well, here was my chance.  A copy of the book right under my nose, and only $3 too.

It's been sitting here for a week.  I was going to take it to work on Tuesday, but I really want to leave Tuesdays for books that I pick up and read at the book store.  

But today Walt was working and I decided to take the day off and read "Catcher in the Rye."  It's about the length of each of the books I read each week at Logos and, in fact, I finished it in three hours, give or take a few minutes.

I'm going to be writing a review of it now to post on my book review page, but I'm tickled that I can cross that item off of my bucket list, even if it was only really on it for about a week!

Ten from My Bucket List

When the movie The Bucket List came out, I tried to think of things that might be on my own bucket list and I couldn't come up with anything. It's not that I'm particularly dull, but more that most of what I wanted to do in life, I've done. Which is really a very nice thing to say. The guys in the film did lots of adventurous things like jumping out of airplanes. I'm not that adventurous. My goals were always pretty low key.

For some reason I was thinking about bucket lists today. I think it was updating my Flickr map that shows the countries I've visited. I thought I'd just start a bucket list and see what I might put on one. This list assumes that money, and babysitting for the dogs, is no object (which pretty much throws the bucket list out the window before I even get started). But here are 10 things I came up with:

1. Spend a week in the South of France in the springtime. I loved the south of France, but I didn't like being on a tour--and I definitely didn't like the summer heat. If we were to rent a house, or even splurge and spend a week at that wonderful hotel in Arles, I could relax enough to do only the things that appealed to me. We could rent a car and drive to the other little towns in the area and do the exploring on our own terms, in our own time. I might even start speaking French.

2. Take the train across the Canadian Rockies. Walt and I went to Canada on our honeymoon, stayed in a cabin in Jasper National Park and camped in Banff National Park. The Rockies were so gorgeous that I said then that some day I wanted to take a train trip across the Canadian Rockies. We could even stop and visit our Brasilian son, Eduardo, in Toronto.

3. Taste stone crabs in Florida. I saw something on the Food Network about stone crabs, which are bigger than my beloved Dungeness crabs. I also Top Chef this week, where someone talked about how much more meat there is in stone crab than in, say, Maryland blue crabs. I would love to be in Florida and have the chance to taste stone crabs.

4. Have a theater orgy in New York. We've been to New York several times and we always go to theatre, but I've never seen a big Broadway musical on Broadway and I would love to go and see several of them in one trip. We always concentrate on the off-Broadway shows, which are more affordable (and our friends are in them!). Who can afford $300 for good seats to a musical? But this Bucket List assumes that money is no object.

(of course most of these shows are not there any more!)

5. While we're in New York, I'd like to be crassly tourist and ride a carriage through Central Park. It's the sort of thing that I always secretly longed to do, but never even suggest because of the money. It would have been fun to take a carriage ride when we were on Mandrogy, but I never said anything.

6. Cruise the Inland Passage to Alaska. No surprise here. I think this appears on every list I have ever posted to this blog! I have a feeling that if I ever actually took this cruise, I'll be terribly disappointed, because I've thought about it for so long.

7. Visit the Sheldrick Elephant Rehabilitation Center in Africa. Daphne Sheldrick started this center to rescue orphaned elephants and rhinos. I am so inspired by her work and the babies they are able to save, also the dedication of the handlers for their little charges. I've helped to sponsor little Lesanju for a few years now.

8. Buy a good SLR camera and take a basic photography course so that I actually started knowing what I'm doing. And we all know that what I really need is an excuse to take more photos, right? :)

9. Visit Iguacu Falls in Brasil and/or Argentina. Our friend Nelson has been promising to take us to Iguacu if we ever get to Brasil for about 20 years or more now.

10. Reunite with some of the "special ones" from our days of hosting people from other countries. I once saw a real tear-jerker of a movie called The Blue Veil. It was so bad (apparently) that it never even made it to tape or DVD. But it starred Jane Wyman as a woman who had worked as a nanny for various families for years. At the end of the movie, all of her former kids, now adults, came back to see her. I always imagined a moment like that with our "special ones" foreign students, though we have now lost contact with most of them.