Life List is another aspect of midlife crisis

After reaching what I like to optimistically call “middle-age” – which, unless I plan on living to 104, is more like “two-thirds-age” – the Life List increasingly weighs on the mind.

The Life List is that list we keep in our heads, the list of things we want to see or do before we run out of, well, life.

I’ve been pondering this subject after a friend of mine came back from South America.

“I looked up in the night sky and there it was – the Southern Cross,” he said. “I thought, there’s another thing I can mark off my list.”

Seeing the Southern Cross is also on my Life List, although I have yet to bag it. The farthest south I have ever been is Florida. This bizarre and exotic land is, surprisingly, in our exact same hemisphere.

(Note to the astronomy-impaired: The Southern Cross is a four-star constellation visible only from the Southern Hemisphere).

(Note to the geography-impaired: The Southern Hemisphere is that part of the Earth that lies south of the equator, or, to put it in layman’s terms, the butt portion of the Earth as opposed to the shank portion.)

The Life List has also been on my mind since my wife, Carol, and I crossed a big one off our lists earlier this month. We went to the Grand Canyon, which was No. 1 on our Life Lists, not because it’s the grandest sight on Earth, although it certainly comes close. It was No. 1 because as we moved into our 50s, it was becoming increasingly absurd that we hadn’t set eyes on the biggest landmark in the West. We have both lived in the West all of our lives and have crisscrossed just about every part of it. Yet, somehow, we had missed the Big Ditch.

When we finally stood there at the brink, we gave ourselves high-fives. Discreet high-fives, of course. We’re not total nerds.

Two days later we crossed another goal off our lists. We saw four California condors, the largest birds in North America (they have 9-foot wingspans, or to put it another way, if you glue two turkeys together, you get one condor). I can’t say they were actually on our Life Lists, since we assumed they were more or less extinct. But once we saw one roosting on a canyon rock, we both agreed that we had always wanted to see one even if we didn’t know it.

So with the Grand Canyon and condors in the bag, we spent the rest of the trip trying to figure out what had moved to the top of our Life Lists. The more we pondered it, the more things we came up with:

• See Alaska.

• Catch a steelhead.

• Hike the Alps.

• Cross Atlantic on the QE II.

• Play golf in Scotland.

• Achieve world peace.

• Follow spring from the Florida Keys to Maine.

• Learn boogie-woogie piano.

• See baseball game at Fenway Park.

• Tour Hong Kong.

• Read all ten volumes of Will and Ariel Durant’s “Story of Civilization.”

• Traverse Australia (and see Southern Cross while at it).

Those should hold us for a while.

By the way, you might say we accomplished one other goal on this trip. Las Vegas is No. 1 on our Reverse Life List, our list of places we strive NEVER to see. We successfully avoided Vegas one more time, even though we were only about 50 miles away as the condor flies.

Of course, we can’t definitively cross Las Vegas off our Reverse Life List. This is the problem with the Reverse Life List: You can’t cross things off until you’re no longer alive. Until then, there’s always the danger that you’ll succumb to temptation and find yourself pumping quarters into the slots at the MGM Grand.

Fortunately, as I mentioned before, we’re well past the midpoint of our quest. We’re two-thirds of the way to our quest of never seeing Vegas. See? Being past mid-life has its advantages.