If Not Now: The List in the Desk Drawer
He sat at her desk and read the list four times.
Wilbur found the list on a Tuesday in March, while looking for a stapler. It was in the second drawer of his late wife Maxine's desk, written in blue ink on the back of a seed catalog page. At the top she had printed "Someday, Together." Under it were nine lines. A slow boat on a mountain lake. A night train with a window seat. Tulips in April. Eating our way through one small city.
Maxine died two years ago. Wilbur is 69. He sat at her desk and read the list four times.
Then he did a sum. His left knee had started to complain on stairs. A doctor had said it might hold for years, or it might not. If it held until 74, that was five more springs. Six of the nine lines on the list meant stairs, hills or cobblestones. Nobody can say how many good walking years are left. He had been counting them anyway.
His son Mateo came on Sunday and Wilbur showed him the page. Mateo read it twice.
"Dad, she wrote together," Mateo said.
"I know what she wrote."
"So what do you do with it?"
Wilbur looked at the window for a while. "I am afraid of two things," he said. "If I go alone, I will spend the whole trip turning to her seat. If I stay home, I will be 79 in this chair with a list that nobody carried out. I do not know which one I am more afraid of."
Mateo did not answer. He put his hand flat on the page, and Wilbur saw that his son was crying. Neither of them said anything for a good minute. The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen.
"I could come on one of them," Mateo said at last. "The boat, maybe."
"I would like that. Not the first one, though. I want to find out what it is like by myself. Then I will know what to ask you for."
That evening he opened the laptop. He picked the line with the fewest steps in it, the boat on the mountain lake. He booked five days. He did not book the night train or the tulips, and he did not decide about the other eight. He copied the list onto a fresh page in his own handwriting, left her original in the drawer, and put the copy in his coat pocket.
You could…
- Read your own list aloud to someone who loved the person you wrote it with. Ask which line they would start with.
- Pick the line with the fewest stairs and book five days, not five weeks.
- Ask a doctor or a physical therapist what your knee or hip could manage on a cobbled street.
- Take the list along and read one line each evening.
Is there a list in a drawer in your home, and which line on it is waiting? Write to us below and tell us what five days of it would look like.
Tell us in the comments