25 Things to Do (or Not Do) Before You Die

Today is my birthday. I'm 65. It's kind of a big deal, because I can now start drawing on my pension from Condé Nast. I only worked for Condé Nast for five years, so my pension is pretty small, especially when you compare it to my heating bill, but we seniors know how to stretch a dollar. For example, if I go for the lump sum, I could buy a tiny little house and have a tiny little electric bill to go with my tiny little pension.

Building a tiny house is one of dozens of items on my retirement to-do list. I revise this list at least once a week. I make big plans, little plans, half-assed plans, genius plans, and really stupid plans. Sometimes I write them down, but mostly I just think them, often when I'm supposed to be doing something else, like the laundry.

Besides designing and building a tiny house, the following items have also popped up, at one time or another, in my retirement plan:

1) Open a guesthouse for writers.
2) Write a series of novels about a travel writer who solves crimes.
3) Run for president.
4) Start a commune.
5) Make a giant wall hanging out of Grandma Tucker's doilies.
6) Transform ancestral portraits into Pop art.
7) Study Latin dance.
8) Learn to play the ukelele. Write songs.
9) Commission a series of ceramic doorknobs.
10) Become a patron of the arts.
11) Learn woodworking.
12) Learn metal sculpture.
13) Give up travel writing.
14) Give away everything I own, one object at a time, so that other people don't have to pick up after me when I die.
15) Make a burn pile out of everything I own and set a match to it.
16) Grow my hair long.
17) Shave my head.
18) Become an exercise instructor for seniors. Wear cute gym outfits and have fun music.
19) Get French drivers license.
20) Make a series of quirky lampshades out of old junk.
21) Read the history of France in 20 volumes (in French, of course).
22) Adopt a refugee family.
23) Walk across America.
24) Walk across Vermont.
25) Become a tour guide.

Obviously, I can never do all of these things, even if I live to be a hundred. Welding? Musical composition? Lampshades? I mean, seriously.

Today, instead of writing another chapter of Kidnapped in the Kasbah or composing a ukelele song about these happy golden years, I am going to rearrange the living room furniture (again), take a long hot shower and squeegee the sliding door in the new bathroom, and schlepp the taka-taka down to the scary room where they keep the trash bins. I will also spend a not unreasonable amount of time worrying about Patrick, who has gone into Paris all on his own, with only his cane for support. Probably he will come back with a birthday present of some sort. It will probably not be a ukelele.

Above: One of dozens of unidentified portraits collected, saved, and mostly labeled (but not this one) by Mabel Lamb Tucker, my grandmother. 

Let Us Be Grateful for This Day

We are at the "almost done" phase of our renovations on the new flat, the most dangerous phase, the phase where, if you're not super-super careful, you will execute a Devon Loch failure—Devon Loch being, of course, the racehorse who was on the verge of winning the 1956 Grand National when he inexplicably jumped into the air on the final stretch and landed on his belly. By the end of this week, I was not on my belly, but close.

Rather than go into the tedious details, let's just say that there are too many boxes, too many stairs, too many shelves, too many 19th-century tchotchkes and too many bulky, heavy pieces of furniture that were meant for much larger rooms than they currently occupy. Pieces with quaint names, like the "confiturier" that takes up a large corner of our living room and was meant for storing apricot jam and canned duck and is now our bar. Not that we need a bar. We could keep our bottle of vodka and our shot glasses in the broom closet. But we have inherited a confiturier, and we don't know what else to do with it.

This week, I single-handedly dislodged another large piece of furniture from the salon and moved it to a bedroom. That piece is a very large wooden chest that, I think, was meant to contain a bridal trousseau. It now contains our winter clothing. In winter it contains our summer clothing. Plus a rug made out of a variety of animal skins (leopard, kudu) and my mother-in-law's fur-lined raincoat.

As I was pondering what to do with this overload of crap, the painter arrived and installed himself in our kitchen. Several packing crates full of kitchen stuff went behind the couch, where the giant wooden chest used to be.

Yesterday was supposed to be the day of our garden party in celebration of the end of the Winter From Hell. The party was supposed to be a thank-you gesture to the many friends who helped us get through the past four months, but two thirds of the guest list was out of town, and the forecast was for rain. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought, "This is one thing I don't have to do," and in the morning, I called my friends and told them I was too tired to have a party after all.

Instead, when Patrick came home from his afternoon at the dialysis clinic, we got in the car and drove to DeeDee and Ray's house in Saint Mammès and walked around their garden, which smelled of honeysuckle and roses. We sat in the serene and joyful comfort of their very beautiful house, which they have lived in for thirty years. You would never know that it has been flooded twice (it sits on the edge of the Seine), and that for a while they could only get to their woodshed in a canoe. Ray opened a bottle of wine and DeeDee arranged little plates of delicacies on the coffee table that Ray made out of a slab of I-forget-what-type-of-wood, and all was calm and lovely. Just as we were leaving, DeeDee raced back into the house for scissors and cut three stems of red roses to take home with us.

Also this week, my friend Mary performed another miracle and managed to take me all the way through IKEA, from start to finish, without having to call for emergency assistance (it was Mary and DeeDee who took me to Castorama to buy a kitchen and a bathroom). Together, we picked out a nice sofa, tested a foldout bed that Patrick has his eye on and found it acceptable, and hauled a Poang chair to 3 rue des Hêtres in the back of Mary's little blue car.

Mary, DeeDee, Judy, Penny, Sian, Avril, Kathleen, Riekie, Simon . . . these are some of the friends who have helped us avoid a Devon Loch moment over the past few weeks and months, coming to our rescue again and again. My sister Martha literally flew to my rescue while Patrick was in the hospital, and my brother John has been helping to look after the house in Randolph, along with friends Jeffrey and Marion Lent. And then there have been the nice Korongo clients, who have been waiting for months, with nary a peep of complaint, for us to return to work.

On Wednesday, we took the train to Paris, where we had an errand at the U.S. embassy, and sat for a long time in the Tuileries Garden, alternately watching the ducks and dozing in the sunshine. On Friday, we drove to the nearby town of Moret sur Loing and walked along the river where the Impressionists set up their easels. We ordered caramel and almond gelato at one of Moret's surfeit of ice cream shops, and sat on the bridge, watching swallows dive through the air. Later, before going to bed, my husband said, "I enjoyed this day," and I was happy.

Now, if I can just keep it together until the charity truck takes away our unloved items, and the junk collector takes away the too-big sofa with the coffee-splotched armrest . . .