Editor’s Note: Bucket List, Radio Cooking

Posted on June 2, 2015 by bob in EdNote

“What’s on your bucket list?” It was a simple question, but one I wasn’t prepared to answer, when a dear friend posed it to me a few months back. 

“I don’t have a concrete list of important life goals I’d like to achieve, if that’s what you mean,” I said. “Of course I have some vague notions of things I’d like to do in the next few years, but nothing chiseled in stone.” I laughed, hoping to move the slightly uncomfortable conversation to a new topic. Not so easy.  This lifelong friend is nothing if not persistent.

“So what are those things?” she pressed, sharing her own bucket list as a means to spur me on.

The gauntlet had been thrown down. I instinctively knew the creation of such a list wasn’t a bad idea (just as I knew I’d never hear the end of it if I didn’t present one). That said, I produced my list in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Big Bang Theory.

More than just a dream, I tried to make all the items realistic, “do-able.” Some elements of the list are not very ambitious. Regardless, they’re still goals I’d like to achieve. Once I’d completed the list, I was glad to have it on paper — a work-in-progress I feel I can add to and from which I can hopefully delete items once they’re accomplished. (I hope! I hope!) Except for my friend, I haven’t shared my bucket list with anyone, not even my family. But I know success rates in accomplishing goals relate to being held accountable. So here’s my list, for God and man to see:

1. Compile a cookbook of family recipes to pass down to our children.

2. Make exercise more of my daily routine and accept it as a part of daily life.

3. Visit the birthplace of my maternal grandfather, now a ghost town on the western coast of Turkey. I’d like to gather as much genealogical detail as possible and begin the difficult job of piecing the ancestry together.

4. Sell a painting at an art show.

5. Write a children’s book.

6. Take a cooking class on the Amalfi coast.

7. Learn French hand sewing.

8. Transcribe my journals from a backpacking trip across Europe in 1976, and couple them with the pictures I took. Self-published books are easy to produce these days, and I’d love to see the images from that once-in-a-lifetime trip combined with the thoughts I had as a 23-year-old girl. 

9.  Visit Greece with our entire family — husband, children, and grandchildren.

10. Make a list of places in the US and around the world I’d like to visit and do it. 

11. Learn French — more than the “comment allez-vous?” I remember from college.

I confess I haven’t accomplished any of these dreams yet. I am painting, I’m trying to exercise more regularly (emphasis on “trying”), there’s an on-line conversational French program I’m perusing, I’ve started to compile my recipes, and I’ve begun outlining of my maternal ancestry (thankfully, a well-organized first cousin has completed the paternal side! But at this point everything is just a work in progress. Not a single, solitary check mark anywhere on the paper.

Do you have a bucket list? Would you share it with Prime readers? If so, please contact me at primeeditor@gmail.com or give me a call at 334-462-7285. We’d love to talk with you and share your dreams — and just as important — your roadmap for checking items off this very important list. I look forward to talking with you!

Cooking on the Radio

Prime Editor Sandra Polizos recently recorded a trio of recipes for Troy Public Radio’s In Focus program, hosted by Carolyn Hutcheson weekdays at noon.  One recipe aired in May, another will be broadcast in June, and the final recipe in July. All three represent Polizos’ Greek heritage.

June 17 — Loukoumathes — Deep fried dough balls drizzled with honey and sprinkled with cinnamon and finely chopped nuts.

July 15 — Peasant Moussaka — A recipe handed down from her grandmother, who was born on the Greek island of Chios.

Troy Public Radio: WTSU 89.9 Montgomery/Troy; WRWA 88.7 Dothan; WTJB 91.7 Columbus, GA/Phenix City, AL