Bucket Lists

I’ve never really believed in making a bucket list. Why put off for tomorrow something you can plan for today?

I suppose it began when I was making the case for spending a college semester in Venice. My university thought that exposing students to other cultures in other lands was an excellent way to further its educational programs. So when I figured out that Wake Forest offered a semester in Venice for the same tuition and the same room rate to live on the Grand Canal instead of a dorm in Winston-Salem, I was all in. The trick was to get my parents to agree. 

This was in the 1970s when Europe was still encouraging college students to backpack about and the book Europe On $5 a Day had just come out with its new edition, promoting the same idea on $10 a Day. And Eurail offered discounted train passes for college students as did airlines. Ah, the good old days. 

I compiled my arguments for spending part of my junior year living in a palazzo on the Grand Canal next door to what is today the Guggenheim Museum, and then was Peggy Guggenheim’s home. As I laid out the well-researched arguments for why a semester in Italy made sense financially and academically, I ran into a question from my mother that stopped me in my tracks.

”If you go to Italy and Europe while you’re in college, Mary, what will you look forward to when you’re older,”” she said. 

I thought I had all her objections laid out. But this, I never anticipated. I paused for a long moment and said, “Many more trips to Europe, I suppose.” 

At that, my mom paused. She, who had pulled a wagon about Deshler, Ohio selling milk and eggs from the farm to augment the Depression era income for her family, and still managed to go to college to get a music degree, paused for a moment. 

“Hmm. That never occurred to me.” 

If she’d lived more than a year past my college graduation, she would have been amazed at our travels to Europe and beyond. With a husband born in the international city-state of Tangier, and a mother-in-law who spent the last 30 plus years of her life in Madrid, with family in Caracas - when it was safer, and in Israel which has rarely been at peace, I’ve  had a remarkable fulfillment of that prediction. 

Here I sit in a sweet little hotel bar within spitting distance of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London remembering all of the trips I have made with my foreign-born husband and our children, realizing that my semester in Venice was just a launching pad for the global curiosity I’ve maintained. 

OK - so maybe there is one item on our joint bucket list that we’ve talked about for more than 45 years…and we’re going to tick that off soon: a crossing of the Atlantic on a ship. 

Jacques has fond memories of the crossings he made as a child as his family was working to log the residency required in the U.S. towards citizenship in the late 1940s and 1950s. He remembers ping pong tournaments, and horse racing games that entertained the children as their parents dressed for dinner in the evenings. And he’s always wanted to do a crossing with me. 

Only once did I call it a cruise. “No. This is different. It’s crossing the ocean with a purpose - to get from one side to the other. Not a cruise to empty out a large ship of tourists in ports of call. Not that there’s anything wrong with that - but a crossing is different.”

We shall see. I’ll let you know how it goes as we cross off this singular bucket item from our otherwise non-existent list.