The Mayor of BOOMTOWN
FX BUCKET LIST?
At the end of this month I’ll be celebrating one of those “benchmark birthdays”. I’m not particularly anxious to share the number, but I’ll just say this. I have been lining my mailbox with Vaseline to help my mail lady squeeze all the various Medicare offers arriving each day. They come by the handful. Part A. Part B. Part C, D, F’n, G. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do before the 27th. If 37 different companies know about this birthday, I struggle to understand why I have to announce it to our clueless gub’ment. In addition to 7 pounds of daily Medicare Mail I’ve been inundated with insurance companies willing to bet me a dollar a day ‘til the day I die that I won’t die. Really. So IF I evaluate this birthday by the USPS, there’s nothing ahead from this point but sickness and eventual death.
I plan to celebrate this birthday because for much of my life, even reaching this age in a non-vegetative state was a bet most people wouldn’t take. For example, I turned 25 in a rubber room facility. I’d gone off the deep end following (another) calamitous breakup with a woman and spent #25 making wallets and welcoming unarmed visitors in a special hospital. Birthday #30 wasn’t much better. The
party had been the night before and if it’s judged by the hangover, it was the worst of all. The pain raged in AND outside my head, on a day that began face-down inside my front door, (floor pattern imbedded in my face). I had to work that morning, head pounding to Air Supply and Lionel Richie ballads through a show I could not remember afterward. HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Ohh- not so loud. That was the worst, and I’m happy to report my birthdays have been far more civil and festive since I grew up a few decades late. Someone recently asked if I had a Bucket List, you know, the things you want to do before the Grim Reaper comes to collect. At that moment, the only thing I could think of was mowing the lawn, because I was a couple days behind and really wanted to get it done. Seriously, I’ve given it lots of thought and there is very little I haven’t experienced or done. My whole life, I always wanted to experience a hurricane. You read about that last month when I wrote A Night To Remember, about Hurricane Andrew. I spent that whole terrifying night thinking “well, this was a stupid thing to wish for”. For the record, I’ve wondered what it’s like to be in an earthquake but having learned from Andrew, I won’t mind if that never gets scratched off the BL.
By Greg Budell
There are some things it’s too late to do. I will never play major league baseball. I had a hole-in-one in golf, so that remains my moment of Sports Glory (I was 14 so I’ve had plenty of time to brag on it). I’ve always wanted to bowl a 300 game (10 strikes was the closest) but I just don’t bowl often enough to get into the groove required to accomplish that one. I once had 9 strikes in a game and scored only a 197, a dubious but difficult achievement. I’ve also accepted that I’ll never master any musical instrument, having tried and failed on everything from the banjo to the accordion. Zithers don’t count, do they? I have one Bucket List item that is doable but unlikely - a trip to Hawaii. I’ve always wanted to visit Pearl Harbor, as it is a place and story I have studied through books, documentaries and films- and I’d like to see it with my own eyes. However, 11 hours on airplanes, TSA and NO SMOKING is more than I can bear. United flies there and I’d be the next passenger getting dragged off a plane by the lips. I’d snap. More realistically, the other historical site I’ve studied and want to see is Dealey Plaza. I’m an admitted JFK conspiracy theorist and need to see this place for myself. Everyone I know who’s gone there says it’s much smaller in person. That’s a perspective I need for myself, and I can drive there.
Greg Budell's column is proudly sponsored by McDonald & Hagen Wealth Management
40 BOOM!
September 2017
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