Wow, have I aged a lot in just one year! According to the Critter, anyway. One hundred years old, eh? Subtract sixty-one and he’d be right.
Last year I thought about but ultimately eschewed writing a want-to-do list. As I’ve approached my fortieth year (my fortieth year? Am I talking about me, or about somebody else?), I’ve had what are known as “life lists” (or also, I have learned, “bucket lists”) on my mind. Though I like lists — depend on them, obsess about them, aim to perfect how I use them — I do not have a life list. The very idea of writing one triggers anxiety. Though the list would of course include only things I want to do, it would nevertheless be just another list of shit to get done.
After all, all I really want to do is write a book of poems.
Oh, and interview my grandmother about her and her parents’ lives. I am haunted by an image of my great-grandmother, Anna Harasomowicz Gallas, sitting in her chair by the window on Warham Road in Windsor, Connecticut. That window was so far away from the place where she was born, Galicia in Poland, which she left as a teenager and to which she never returned. How very different her life was from mine; I want to explore those differences, as well as the continuities from her life to my grandmother’s to my mother’s to mine. There’s a book in my questions about us. Is it a book of poems, or is it something else? I’d like to find out.
And also, I want to do jukai — and commit myself to a lifetime of giving.
OK, never mind: apparently I do have a life list — of just three things. Of course there are other things I want to do: go to Ireland again, to London, to Paris. Write (at least) two nonfiction e-books. Learn how to take better photographs, how to sew, how to draw, and so on.
But these three things are the things I have to do, that I would deeply regret neglecting.
Sometimes I’m sorry that I wasn’t wilder when I was younger, and sometimes I’m sorry that I wasn’t more sure of myself then. But all those years have brought me to where I am now, at this home, with this family, and with this insight.
Nice at last to be able to let all the other nonsense fall away.
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Do you have a life list? What’s on it?
On Mother’s Day, I got to go on my first postpartum run. Yay!
