48 Crash! My Bucket List for My 48th Birthday

So tomorrow (Tuesday, January 6th) I will be 48 years old.

As this birthday began to make itself visible in the horizon a month or so ago, I found myself eyeing it suspiciously, even fearfully. 48. Four dozen years. Only two years away from the half-century mark.  Jeez, I’m old.  I’m so old I’m - *gasp* - middle-aged!  (Consider the Suzi Quatro song from which I borrowed this post’s title, with her snarling put down of the stereotypical male midlife crisis: “You've got the kind of a mind of a juvenile Romeo/And you're so blind you could find that your motor ain't ready to go...”  Ouch!) 

But, as the day has drawn ever closer, I changed my stance and decided to embrace it.  Sure I’m older, but I've had many truly wonderful experiences during my 48 trips around the sun.   I figure I’d like to make it to 100, and by that measure I’m not even halfway there!

Many folks have their lifetime bucket lists – the things they want to do, see or experience before they die.  Since I have already declared 2015 to be the First Annual Year of Bryan (first of many – I’m going to 100, remember?), I have put together my bucket list not for life, but for this 48^th year!  So here are the 48 things I want to do, see or experience before 49 shows up in 365 days.  Some are musts, some are wants, some are hopes and dreams – but all are actually doable.  I figure I will check in here at the blog about once a month and let you folks know how I’m coming along.  And please, if any of you wish to help out on any item on the list, by all means speak up! The First Annual Year of Bryan is for all to participate in and enjoy!

In no particular order:

1.       Lose 48 pounds (4 pounds a month is very doable, I figure)

2.       Develop weekly exercise program (get off my butt and move!)

3.       Complete 1967 baseball card set (already in process!)

4.       Front porch painted (desperately needed)

5.       Deck repaired/sealed (desperately needed)

6.       Learn to drive (this would be a major accomplishment)

7.       Convert vhs collection to digital (already in process!)

8.       Convert album collection to digital (already in process!)

9.       See One-Eyed Doll in concert again – this time as a VIP (my favorite current band – if you read this blog you know that! Kimberly and Junior are awesome folks, but to get to hang out after a show with them would be amazing!)

10.   See Sparks in concert (my two all-time favorite bands are Bow Wow Wow and Sparks.  Got to see Bow Wow Wow in concert, but not Sparks…yet)

11.   Visit the beach (it’s been years since I’ve seen the ocean)

12.   Truly return to regular blogging schedule (I keep trying!)

13.   Start my own podcast (have wanted to do this for awhile now)

14.   Write a book (I keep trying!)

15.   Learn to cook pastitsio (I am spoiled by the annual Greek Food Bazaar here in Lancaster; I will learn to cook this dish well!)

16.   See Mount Rushmore (one of our country’s sights I’ve always wanted to see in person to truly take in its scale and majesty)

17.   Travel out of the country (I've never been – not even to Canada or Mexico)

18.   Attend a murder-mystery dinner  (they always seem like fun)

19.   Host a cookout (something I've wanted to do for as long as I’ve owned the house)

20.   Enroll in a beginner yoga class (ties into the earlier exercise thing)

21.   Get back on radio in some way (used to do radio in college and loved it – and miss it!)

22.   Try again to reconnect to Shillington, PA (I blogged about discovering that a childhood best friend had passed away in this post.  Something is still nagging at me to find a way to reconnect to someone from that era of my life.  I’d like to follow that urge and discover why – where will it lead me?)

23.   Volunteer (I want to find some way to give back)

24.   Take an improv comedy class (I have always been impressed by those who can do improve well; I’d like to see how well I could do at it)

25.   Research family tree (already in process – wonder how far back I can go?)

26.   Spend one full week "off the grid" (one week with no internet, no iPhone, no Facebook…)

27.   Cut debt load in half (already in process, I am pleased to say!)

28.   Create a passive income source (sure would help with the debt load)

29.   Taste a truly expensive scotch (just to see how truly different it is from the stuff I can afford)

30.   Host a game night (I love Wil Wheaton's “Tabletop” YouTube series – I’d love to have a group of friends over for a board game or two like that)

31.   Host a movie night (have a group over to watch a couple of my personal faves)

32.   Attend a storage auction (I’m a sucker for those storage auction shows on TV!)

33.   See the Grand Canyon (another one of our country’s sights I've always wanted to see in person to truly take in its scale and majesty)

34.   Drop grudges (some I have held for too long. I want to learn to forgive)

35.   Speak before an audience of 1000 or greater (ah, the great fear of public speaking!)

36.   Be onstage (sort of ties into the item above, but maybe as more of a baby step: just get onstage, even in a non-speaking role, just to put myself in front of people)

37.   Learn to juggle (it always looks like people who can juggle well are having a blast!)

38.   Prepare my will (I may plan to make it to 100, but sometimes the Universe has other plans.  Best to prepare)

39.   Be a part of a flashmob (have wanted to do this for some time)

40.   Take a hot air balloon trip (seems like it would be both peaceful and exhilarating)

41.   Have a real lobster roll from Maine (can’t get ‘em much fresher, I’m told)

42.   Take a coast-to-coast train ride (what better way to see the country?)

43.   Learn CPR (just think I should know in the event of an emergency)

44.   Fire a gun (for the experience)

45.   Visit a zoo (loved the zoo as a kid; haven’t been to one since I was a kid!)

46.   Learn to play the harmonica (for those days when I get the blues in my soul)

47.   Get a professional massage (I’m told it’s wonderful)

48.   Cook every single recipe in a cookbook (just start at page one and work my way through!)

This Is How It Feels

To feel as if every compliment you receive is insincere,
          as if you're being lied to
          as if they're all laughing at you

To feel, deep in your soul, that you're being
          set up
          torn down
          walked on
          worked over
     and that everyone - everyone - will eventually
          turn on you
          or leave you
          or deceive you

To feel that clutching in your gut

To feel like you're crying out from deep inside your own mind
         where you are trapped
To feel like you're crying out from deep inside your own mind
         where you are trapped
To feel like you are crying

Last Cigarette - Celebrating Ten Years Smoke Free!

"Yea I know its killing me
Yea I know its killing me
Yea I know I know I know I know I know I know I need a
Last cigarette, last cigarette, last cigarette, one before I go to bed..."

 - Dramarama, "Last Cigarette"

At my worst, in my junior year of college, I was on a two pack a day habit.  Stop and think about that for a moment.  20 cigarettes in a pack means 40 cigarettes a day.  To maintain that level of smoking, I had to pretty much constantly have a cigarette going. And I pretty much did.

My smokes were always within arm's reach of the bed when I went to sleep at night – you know, for those wake-you-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night cravings – so the morning routine involved having my first smoke of the day lit and half gone before I even got out of bed.   If it was a weekday, there were the before and after class clutches of smokers to join in with.  I smoked while I walked between classes.  I smoked before and after meals in the dining hall.  I smoked while playing pool in the commons building.  I smoked while I studied back in the dorm room.  If it was a weekend, well, there were parties all over campus, and you couldn't have a drink without a smoke.  Hell, I even mastered the art of smoking in the shower.

Back then, though, most people I knew smoked.  I knew more people who smoked than people who didn't.  It was something we just did.  It was relaxing, stress-reducing.  It was a social activity.  It looked cool and chicks dug it, or so we told ourselves.  Hey, what better way to break the ice with a cute co-ed than to ask if she had an extra smoke – or better yet, to come to her rescue with an extra of your own if she was smokeless and nic-fitting. 

We coughed up black stuff, we hacked and wheezed, we smelled like chimneys, our clothes were permeated with the stench of stale tobacco, our fingers were yellowed with nicotine stains.  And yet we smoked, smoked, smoked and smoked some more.

I had smoked on and off pretty regularly since I’d guess about age 13 (confession: as a third or fourth grader I had experimented a little bit thanks to neighborhood friends’ older brothers and sisters letting smoke some of their cigarettes – usually as part of the pact made with the younger siblings in exchange for their silence around their parents), but it was in college where I became a true smoker.  Never mind my terrible sinuses or semi-annual bouts of bronchitis – smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!

One year, a particularly bad bout of bronchitis brought my smoking to a temporary halt.  I physically could not breath in regular air without launching into an extended coughing fit, much less inhale a lungful of tobacco smoke.  After about a week, I was at my wit's end, decided I was feeling well enough, and broke down and had a smoke.  And another.  And then another.  As coincidence would have it, the bronchitis had run its course, and within a day or two I was feeling much more like myself again.  When I recounted for anyone who would listen that finally smoking was surely what had cured me, my roommate simply shook his head and said, “Bryan, you have no friend in the Surgeon General.”

After college I wound up spending a few years in the restaurant industry – again finding myself among a group of people who smoked.  Heavily.  By now I was down to a more manageable half a pack a day, but still I smoked.  My girlfriend at the time and I lived in a tiny two-room apartment, and we both smoked - she probably more than I, although with a drink or two in me I could still run through a pack or more in an evening if the mood was right.  We’d tell each other that we really should quit; we’d make pacts to quit together, but we never did quit.

Now, fast forward a few years.  That girlfriend and I had split up; I was out of the restaurant biz and doing very well in my marketing career.  Well enough, in fact, that I was ready to move out of that cramped apartment and buy my first house.  As my friends and I were moving things out of the apartment,  I saw a sight I will never forget.  We pulled the sofa away from the wall, and there was a nearly perfect outline of the sofa on that wall – clean wall where the sofa had been, soot- and smoke-stained wall where it had not.  I vowed at that moment that I would not treat my new house that way.  I made a rule for myself that I would not smoke in the new house. I would go outside to smoke.

Over the course of the first two or three years in the house, that's exactly what I did.  There has never been a cigarette smoked inside this house since I've owned it.  I either went out on the front porch or the back patio if I wanted to smoke.  Slowly, over time, without realizing it, I was finding less and less desire to stop whatever I was doing to go smoke a cigarette.  Soon I was pretty much only smoking at work on lunch break. 

The Day came at the end of week's vacation from work.  As usual for me, it was a stay-at-home vacation.  One night I went out on the patio and lit up a cigarette.  After just a drag or two, it occurred to me that this was the first cigarette I had lit up in a week.  Not intentionally, not consciously, it just hadn't occurred to me to smoke; I hadn't needed to smoke. “I don't need this!” I said to myself and crushed out the nearly unsmoked cigarette.

That was September 4, 2004.  Ten years ago.  I have not smoked another cigarette since that day.

I vowed that I would never be one of those militant ex-smokers. I’m of the live and let live school: you want to smoke?  Go ahead, enjoy.  Believe me, I know how good that smoke can be.  You're trying to quit?  Believe me, I know how hard the habit is to break.  But I am living proof that it can be broken – for good.

 

Ten years smoke free.  That’s worth celebration.

Sometimes You Can't Go Back

For three years, from my first grade through third grade years, my family lived in Shillington, PA, a suburb of Reading.  Governor Mifflin Apartments, the development where we lived during that stretch, looked every bit of the year we moved in, 1973: long brick buildings in the style of colonial mansions (set along cleverly named thruways with names like Colonial Drive and Mansion Drive...ahem), at each end of which were three floors of four apartments each. First-floor communal laundry rooms and halls of storage lockers tied the two ends together.

The central playground where we kids spent most of our time would terrify the safety-conscious parent of today, but in the 70s it was perfectly fine to have metal monkey bars, a metal swing set, a metal sliding board and a metal merry-go-round all baking in the summer sun on a canvas of macadam and surrounded by chicken wire fence.  We seared our skin, scraped knees and elbows regularly, lost teeth, got mildly impaled by bare ends of chicken wire, cracked skulls and more, but we all came out of it OK.  Builds character, right? There was even half a basketball court and a volleyball court in the back of the playground. Ever play volleyball on macadam surrounded by chicken wire fence?

Behind the playground was a small wooded area, with a path that led down to a little creek. It was a great place for us kids to build forts, climb trees, learn how to curse and how to smoke cigarettes and how to throw a punch. We were Tarzan swinging through the jungle; we'd make little ramps and jump our bikes over the creek in our best Evel Knievel impersonation; we'd make small fires and watch dead leaves burn.  If we were really lucky, some of the bigger kids would join us and tell us stories about how the world worked, but more often than not they'd just be there to chase us away so could use the woods for whatever the bigger kids did there (coming of age lessons I wouldn't be old enough to learn until after my family moved back to Lancaster).

There was, as there always is in each chapter of your life, a cast of characters, but 40 years on the names and faces grow hazy. Friends like Mike Magaro, who is one of the few whose last name I can remember because when we referred to him it was always as if his full name were one word: Mikemagaro.  There was an Indian girl, Shefali; a kid about year older also named Brian (I spell mine with a "y," but that wasn't the differentiator at that age - he was "Big Brian" and I was "Little Bryan"); Harry, who was always unfindable when we played hide-and-go-seek in the storage lockers; Adriene, the girl I walked home from school with each day and was my first grade "crush."  There was my first bully, Barry Winkler, who would chase us smaller kids around with rocks or his BB gun and relentlessly picked on me, sending me home in tears more times than I can count.  There was my first best friend, Steve Yoder.

Steve Yoder and I became friends in the second grade, and it was in my runnings around with Steve that I did many of the things already listed.  I taught myself how to ride a bike thanks to Steve letting me ride his before I actually had one of my own.  We'd spend hours playing air hockey at Steve's apartment, throw a football or baseball around on a weekend afternoon (or gather other kids and try to get a game of kickball going).  We had dinners with each other's families. Typical best-friend stuff.

After third grade, my family made the move back to Lancaster.  Soon, a new cast of characters replaced that Shillington crew, and as I got older memories of Shillington faded deeper into the background - never completely forgotten, but rarely thought of.  Not quite a year ago, I was digging through a box of some old school papers and other scribblings from my youth.  I had always written stories, back as far as kindergarten, and I was fortunate to have some teachers along the way - specifically, in Shillington, my first grade teacher, Miss Londeen, and third grade teacher, Mrs. Voigt, - who actively encouraged my writing and creativity.  Hidden in this box were stories I wrote back then, often using myself and my friends as the characters.

It made me a bit nostalgic, and I decided I was going to try to see if I could find any of the folks I would have known back in Shillington online.  I fired up Facebook, and the first name I thought to look for was my old friend Steve Yoder.  Well, in this area of the country, Yoders are as common as Smiths, and Steves are all over the place.  At least a hundred Steve Yoders popped up.  OK, let's see...what if I did a search for what would have been my graduating class had I stayed in Shillington? Sure enough, there is a group page for Governor Mifflin School District Class of 1985!  I figured this must be paydirt! Would I recognize any names?  If I joined the group, would anyone remember me from my three-year stint at the beginning of that class's journey through school?

I began to scroll through the page, and stopped about five posts in.  It was a link to Steve Yoder's obituary. Steve had been killed in an automobile accident in May of 2011.

I had not spoken with or even seen Steve Yoder in nearly 40 years; I had barely thought of Steve in that time either, save for brief bouts of nostalgia.  Yet, it was like being punched in the gut.  The first best friend I ever had in life had reached the end of his, more than a year before I had stumbled across this link to his obituary. There would be no "hey, remember me?"  No getting together for a beer after 40 years.  No finding an old friend.

That pretty much put the immediate brakes on my nostalgic search.  I didn't want to to know who else might be gone.  I tried to join the group's page, but it seems that group has been inactive for some time - no one appears to be moderating the page and my request to join is still languishing there.  Somehow appropriate.

That night, I sat quietly in my living room, with no TV or music, and raised a toast to my friend.  I don't know where we go when we're done here - the traditional concepts of Heaven and Hell seem far too cut and dried to me, yet I'd like to believe there is something more, some better place. Wherever that is, I hope that when my time to go there comes, I will finally get the chance to meet up once again with my old friend for some air hockey or to toss a baseball around.  Until then, I wish him peace. And, I have had reinforced in me that it is worth it to take the time to tell those you consider friends - good friends, best friends - how much you value their friendship. You never know when someone you'd least expect to be gone, will be.

Six Word Sunday

The beautiful ones are always crazy.