1. I will never, ever fly again. I did it five times in
my life---long before 9/11---when the seats were bigger, the food was real, the
flight attendants actually gave you service and the lines at the airports were
shorter. I did not enjoy the experience all five times, now I’d probably hate
it.
2. I will never, ever pick stuff off the carpet again
without my glasses on. Scared the crap out of me when I did it once and the
“lint” started moving. I dropped that spider and he got away to live another
day.
3. I will never, ever eat sushi, liver, veal, crickets or
any insects even if they’re dipped in chocolate. Actually, except for liver, I've never eaten any of these so I should kick #3 off the list of things I'll never do again or maybe change it to: I will never, ever pass up
a chance to eat Ben and Jerry’s American Dream or mint chocolate ice cream.
4. I will never, ever use Krazy Glue again without
protective eye wear. God, it hurts when you accidentally glue your eye lid to
your eyeball. I was fixing an antique kitchen chair and I put glue in a hole
and shoved the chair rung into the hole, splashing the glue in my eye. At the
emergency room they said it’s such a common accident that they keep drops in
stock that un-glues the glue. The burn the Krazy Glue caused took a couple of
weeks to heal but left no permanent damage.
5. I will never, ever knowingly break a law---well,
except for speeding. I do that way too often. I keep wondering when that old
person gene kicks in that will have me driving fifteen miles an hour in a
fifty-five mile zone. But in general, I’m a rules-following kind of person.
6. I will never, ever text without punctuation and proper
spelling…except for when auto-correct changes things and I can’t fix it. It
took me too long to learn how to do those things correctly or I should say do
them within a reasonable degree of accuracy. And have a complained lately about
how much I hate acronyms? Except for LOL I have to look them all up.
7. I will never, ever make love in a patch of poison ivy
again. Once in a life time is enough. But you’ll have to use your imagination because
I’ll not be sharing more details of that moonlit, summer night.
8. I will never, ever grow old gracefully. I’ve never
done anything gracefully in my life. Why start now? I do hope to grow old,
though…100 would be nice but that’s assuming I won’t be living out of a
shopping cart and sleeping under a bridge. A week of doing that and I’d be
slitting my throat.
9. I will never, ever stop caring about the environment,
the French Impressionists, my family---not necessarily in that
order---civilized society, educational opportunities for all, liberal arts,
libraries and books, wildlife, sea-life and domestic animals.
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
10. I will never, ever quit wondering what my life would
have been like if I knew in my twenties what I know today. I’m pretty sure we
all do this kind road-not-taken mind-game on rare occasions and I’m also guessing that most of us come to the same conclusion---that if we could do it all over again,
we’d take the same path…missteps, mistakes, warts and all. No missteps are ever wasted because they teach us how to recognize and grab onto the good stuff
that comes along. So I keep all my memories tucked away and invite them out to
play on those full moon nights when sleep eludes me. ©
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by….” Robert Frost
