Bucket List

Other than growing the perfect tomato I discovered I didn't really have a bucket list. My garden has always been a central focus in my life and when I built my studio twenty years ago I located it on the far edge of my lot so I could have full view of its seasonal offerings. Two walls

are mostly glass and I can see the pool, the greenhouse and the garden from where I work.

At any point in life one can contemplate the past, speculate the future or worry about the present. I have done very little worrying about the present in my life. I accept it as a gift. It is sometimes a challenge and I accept that too. I am a list maker, a left over from my school teaching days. I set goals and the ways I intend to achieve them. I have discovered that we are often the destroyer of our own goals. Something interrupts. An allowed intrusion. Our own conflicts within us. We are not one person.

Cancer was never on my list. Pain was never on my list. Getting old was never on my list.

When I was just too tired to exist I did not think about the future. My life became a series of re-runs, the movie running backwards. Disorganized and episodic, a story out of sequence. I remembered details and smells and colors, old school teachers and lost loves. I have mentioned

many of these on this blog, you will just have to hunt for them.

For over eight months my only thought of tomorrow was I knew it would be worse. That is not a concept that I was used to. I am a maker of things and the director of my own play. This

theater is mine and I found myself in the audience, watching. I am screaming. It can't end this way! This is not a one act play. Far too much drama for what surely was meant to be a comedy.

The cancer is gone now and so is that old man that I did not recognize nor wanted to be.

No curtains yet, hold any applause. No tears nor laughter, there is one final act. The preparations are complete, no more rehersals. Encore. I get to do it one more time!