BUCKET LIST

It’s a good thing that getting rich was never on my bucket list, because I have spent most of my life as a student or writer/editor, and am now embarrassingly grateful for Social Security and senior discounts. My own goals have been different, though they required some money to be accomplished.

After a few years of working to put my first husband through grad school, I was envious and frustrated enough to want a Ph.D. for myself. Never mind the fact that an M.A. was nearly sufficient for my needs—I was grimly determined to be Dr. Stone. It meant denying myself and my new husband many things. However, at the age of 46 I was able to clutch a diploma from the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. An important item crossed off the bucket list!

After earning the doctorate, I hoped to help design an NSF curriculum project like one of those I had edited. However, funding for curriculum projects was winding down by that time, and so I set up an editorial business, The Stone Cottage, instead. It was meant to be a temporary situation. I closed the business 30 years later.  . .  Owning my own business was very satisfying in many ways, but it had never been a bucket-list item.

When the phone rang in 2000 and Dr. Robert Krebs asked if I would like to write my own biology textbook for Greenwood Press, it seemed like a gift from heaven. I tried to restrain myself, and instead screamed, “Yes! Yes!” Authoring my own science book, rather than co-authoring or editing yet another one, had been a dream for years. Writing The Basics of Biology  turned out to be very difficult (and not very profitable), especially as my husband was dying during those years; somehow I persisted, and have been pleased with the results.

Being a good caregiver was unplanned, yet became a major goal during my husband’s illness and my mother’s aging. They are both dead now, and I did take good care of them. Nothing I have ever done has been so important.

Studying French in college had exposed me to that graceful language and literature, and I planned to travel to France at the first opportunity. The years passed, though, and I was unable to cross France off my list until 2005, when I finally went to Paris with an Elderhostel group. Though the tour was wonderful, I should have managed somehow to go there when I was young.

My bucket list today has changed greatly from what it was years ago. I never expected to spend my retirement years living in the woods and traveling in a motorhome! Yet, this way of life has led me to wishing to visit all the national parks—it is most unlikely that I will manage that—in addition to traveling abroad again and doing many more things before I kick the bucket.