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My Leaky Bucket

The Source

The Jack Nicolson/Morgan Freeman movie, The Bucket List, follows the fate of two terminally ill men fulfilling a “to do” list before they kick the bucket, and the film set off a worldwide craze of people compiling their own list of things they must do before they die. I tried compiling just such a catalog once and found it to be short. I’d already done most of what I’d like to do and in fact, my list of things that I did once and never care to do again was not only longer but much more interesting. For some odd reason, kissing the Blarney Stone popped immediately into my head. Ireland’s Blarney Castle is perhaps the country’s most famed tourist attraction and the must-do thing at Blarney is to kiss the stone, thus insuring you the gift of gab for the rest of your life. In fact, I’ve actually heard people speak of the rocky smooch being a part of their lifelong bucket list. I did it once and that was plenty. After climbing a narrow set of crumbling stone steps then lying on your back and lowering yourself into an extremely un-photogenic position, an elderly Irishman tries desperately to hold onto your legs while you touch your lips to a piece of rock that millions of others have kissed since 1446 when the stone was first put into its place in the castle wall. I’m pretty sure that the same man has been holding tourists legs for the duration of the stone’s existence. Why do people do this? Why did I do this? There are no records of the number of white-socked elderly tourists who’ve fallen to their death and now lie buried at the base of Blarney Castle, but I’m sure that when you do fall there will be a photographer handy to sell you a copy of the carnage. Been there, done that, don’t care to do it again. Some people want to climb mountains. I do not. My senior class traveled to Colorado for our senior trip and one day our dude ranch guide suggested we sign up for a daylong class in mountain climbing. I was a dumb teenager and my friends seemed up for it, so I climbed into a jeep and headed for the nearest mountain. Since Colorado is built upon a mountain this didn’t take long to find, and before I realized what was happening I found myself strapped into a climbing harness and dangling over the valley of certain death. What was I thinking? What would my mother say? This crazed half-goat of a tour guide was suspending gullible teenagers from Perry, Illinois, over the Colorado Rockies. I don’t even like ladders. Another kick in my bucket. My mother once announced to our family that she was going to Egypt. I asked her why and she said, “Because I’d like to ride a camel.” Mom did then go to Egypt and did indeed ride a camel, but if I remember correctly the jaunt also involved a Presbyterian Church meeting. Since mom paved the way for Presbyterians on camels, I climbed on one myself at the zoo in Sydney, Australia. Perhaps Australian camels are different than Egyptian dromedary, for my mother said she enjoyed her ride. I didn’t. I’d ridden in Willy’s Jeeps, two-cylinder John Deere’s with no power steering, and a variety of Hondas with no visible means of shock absorber, but nothing quite matched the herky-jerky conflagration that camel inflicted upon the shrimp kabobs rolling around inside my digestive system. I tossed the camel out my bucket. A few sundry items on my “Been there, done that, don’t need to try it again” list: Eating pickled eel (trouble is, it tastes like pickled eel), trying beef tongue (trouble is, it looks like a cow’s tongue), watching a live performance of The Nutcracker (too tutu), attending an opera (To quote Churchill on his first experience with opera, “Too many notes. Too many notes”), water skiing (no lake should go by at that speed), motorcycling (hard pavement is the only thing worse than a lake going by too fast), sitting through a symphony concert by a new age minimalist composer (the only thing minimal was the author’s talent), scuba diving (how can you get claustrophobic in something as large as the ocean?), golf (to quote the old Lee song, “Is that all there is?”), water sliding (these contraptions were designed to extract a thrill from whooshing down a slippery slide at insane speeds…the only extraction I got was the back end of my swimming suit from my anatomy), playing bridge (I made the mistake of playing my first game with people who took this seriously), and handball (those things hurt!). Bottom line: may your fill your bucket to overflowing with exciting and wonderful adventures. To badly misquote Tennyson, “’Tis better to have bucketed and lost than never to have bucketed at all.”