Mount Pleasant Public Library

The bucket list, sorted into Saturdays

The list had lived on the refrigerator for nine years. See the northern lights. Fly fish in Montana. Read Middlemarch properly. Learn to make bread that isn't a brick. Nice list, no engine, and the reason it had no engine is that turning a wish into a plan is administrative work, and administrative work is the enemy of people with energy but not infinite energy. The machine is an engine for exactly this. I photographed the list and asked the plain question. Organize these into a five year plan, respecting that I have a bad hip, a fixed income, and a wife who will do three of these with me and mock me through the other two. The plan came back in a shape I could actually feel. The lights, it said, are a February trip with a budget attached and a town named, and here is the two year window when the sun's cycle favors you. Montana wants the hip replaced first, so it lands in year two, after the surgery, as the recovery goal, which reframed the whole surgery. Middlemarch is 36 weeks at 40 pages a week, and the machine asks me about it every Sunday, a book club of one, and the mock parts are baked in. The bread, it turned out, needed one specific answer about my oven, and then it needed four Saturdays, and the fifth loaf was bread. Nine years on the refrigerator. One evening of sorting, and the list became Saturdays, and Saturdays are where life actually happens. The lights are booked for February. My wife has new long underwear and strong opinions about it. The engine works.

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