I don’t have a bucket list.

There are a couple of things that I have always wanted to do, among them having something I wrote published in The New Yorker.  I’d like to go to Lebanon someday, when it’s safe.  I’d like to see Ireland and Austria, the other two lands of my heritage.  Heck, I’d like to have a passport — or, more to the point, a reason to apply for one.

But I’m not running around trying to do those things before I die.  I’m content to drive from Brookside to Westport with the occasional interim stop on the Plaza and less occasionally, venture over to The Dark Side, across State Line Road.  I’ve traveled extensively in the continental US, but never had any need for that little blue folder so necessary to re-enter this country.  The closest I’ve come is swinging over the Mexican border in El Paso, in one of those Sky cars.

But I don’t mind.

Instead of a bucket list, I’m making a list of Things About Which I Can’t Really Complain.

HIgh on the list:  My health.  Oh, I hear you all laughing.  But just think — nobody found me dead on my bathroom floor today, which, sadly, is more than can be said for one of the greatest actors of our day.

Next on the list:  My family.  My husband and I are as unlike as an orange and a football, but when I drop something, he picks it up.  When I step out onto ice, his handy steadies me.  When I dog myself, he sends me the most encouraging e-mails any number-cruncher ever wrote his writer/lawyer wife.   And don’t get me started on my son — I’d wear your ears out.  And, I’m happy to report, my son finally got  the brother and sister for which he asked on his third birthday, and I’m happy to be quasi-mother to them both.

And dear, sweet Joanna, who inspired this blog, gave me three years of being Somebody’s Daughter that seem to have finally smoothed the remaining edges on my longing for my own long-dead mother.

I’ve had a lot of gifts just handed  to me.  I can turn a phrase, pen a letter, think on my feet from time to time.  I’ve got a cussedly optimistic streak and I’ve been compared to the Energizer Bunny, sometimes in good humor.  So, I’m keeping a list of everything about which I have no complaint.  If you want to get on the list, drop me a line!