Time for the rest of us to create a 'bucket list'

It feels like we're all supposed to have a bucket list, even though very few of us do.

Maybe 2021 is the year we start.

The idea of a "bucket list" has been around for a long time, but it really took hold in 2007, when the Jack Nicholson-Morgan Freeman film with that title was released. Thirteen years after the movie came out, you still see references to bucket lists, usually by people who share things on media.

A bucket list, of course, is a list of things you want to do before you die. Great big things.

We see people share/brag about "bucket-list" items all the time. It's slowed during the pandemic era, but you've seen these.

"Another item checked off my bucket list – a trip to Buckingham Palace," someone will share on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. "Visited Graceland. Another bucket list item," or "I can't believe I parachuted. Another item off my bucket list."

The rest of us sigh. We've never made a "bucket list" and we aren't that adventurous. Other people's bucket lists just make us feel unaccomplished.

Well, things have changed. We've spent much of the past nine-plus months at home. We're not going to Graceland or Buckingham Palace.

Heck, we're not even going to Buckingham Charter School in Vacaville, am I right? Hello?

So how about if we concocted a bucket list that isn't so crazy? A bucket list of things we can brag about achieving without making ourselves uncomfortable? A COVID-19-era bucket list, even if some of the things were done before the pandemic?

What about a bucket list for the rest of us?

You can come up with your own, but allow me to propose a bucket list of things I can achieve, but are worth telling people that they were on my bucket list.

Here's a working bucket list, with several items already achieved, to make it seem well under way:

• Be good to the Earth by going a month without gassing up my car (accomplished in 2020!).
• Watch an entire sporting event without leaving my chair.
• Go to the dentist twice in one calendar year.
• Meet Tony Wade.
• Clean out my email inbox. (If you include putting things in folders as "cleaning out.")
• Successfully complete a Sudoku puzzle in the newspaper without crossing out numbers and shouting that it requires witchcraft to do so.
• Iron clothes that need it before a second round of laundry is cleaned.
• Spend 45 minutes awake without checking my phone. OK. Twenty-five minutes. OK. Five minutes.
• Sleep through the night without getting up to go to the bathroom (minimum four hours sleep).
• Read multiple novels by the same author.
• Clean the gutters on my house before the first rain. (A goal for 2021!)
• Forget meeting Tony Wade.
• File my taxes before the deadline. Barely.
• Grow my hair for months (accomplished in 2020!).
• Stay at a hotel and remember my room number.
• Lather, rinse and repeat.
• Remember a computer password that I haven't used in a while.
• Refrain from rolling my eyes at someone else's "bucket list" post on social media, after remembering that time I went 45 minutes without checking my phone. OK. Twenty-five minutes. OK. Five minutes.
• Survive a global pandemic.

Bring it on, 2021! We've got some bucket-list items to complete!

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.