Here is the poem I am memorizing. It has a fitting title, but really it’s a love poem.

A Birthday

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot:
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.
~ Christina Rossetti

I’m drawn to the happiness of the first stanza. A heart full of happiness and love is a wonderful way to live. And obviously I like the birthday reference, though it’s not really talking about the same kind of birthday.

But really this is not my favourite poem of all time. I haven’t found that one yet. I’m happy that many of my friends are able to name a favourite poem, but none of their suggestions was ‘the one.’

It may have been misguided to decide to memorize a poem for one of my Top 40, because the real challenge is finding the right poem to memorize. Usually only a few lines resonate with me. Such as these famous Robert Frost ‘endings’:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

or,

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

So I’ve completed #32. But there’s no joy in Mudville because I’ve struck out at finding my perfect poem. For now.

Today I spent the afternoon enjoying performances of Indian cultural dancing called Bhangra.

To be honest, it wasn’t on my list of 40 things. How could it be, when I’d never heard of it? Today was supposed to be the day I tested myself by eating a super-hot curry. I enjoy Indian food but usually stick to the mild stuff. But that challenge has to wait as the friend I was going out for food with, SJ, asked if I’d like to go to a fundraiser for a Scarborough Bhangra school instead. I thought about it – the invite was via email so I had the luxury of time – and decided to say YES.

I was reminded of Tina Fey’s book, Bossypants, and the section about saying yes. Tina started in improv and in her book she shared the rules of improvisation. The first rule is to AGREE and SAY YES.

She wrote:
When you’re improvising, this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created. So if we’re improvising and I say, “Freeze, I have a gun,” and you say, “That’s not a gun. It’s your finger. You’re pointing your finger at me,” our improvised scene has ground to a halt. But if I say, “Freeze, I have a gun!” and you say, “The gun I gave you for Christmas! You bastard!” then we have started a scene because we have AGREED that my finger is in fact a Christmas gun.

Now, obviously in real life you’re not always going to agree with everything everyone says. But the Rule of Agreement reminds you to “respect what your partner has created” and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where that takes you.

My YES to SJ took me to a Markham banquet hall where more than 10 teams of dancers competed in Bhangra. It was high-energy with colourful outfits and all ages of boys and girls performing. I loved it. I wanted to try it myself… but just the arm motions because my nearly-40-year-old knees could not take all that bouncing and jumping.

It was definitely worthy of being #33. I was proud of myself for doing something different. Next time I need a smile or an energy boost, I think I’ll watch some YouTube Bhangra. The photo below is an internet pic. Today’s dancers were moving so fast I couldn’t get a clear shot.

A stock image of the type of dancing I enjoyed today.

The first of my good deeds, today I picked up garbage along my road.

I live on a rural road. When I go out for a walk, I’ve always noticed the garbage that accumulates along the route and I’ve always considered walking with a garbage bag to pick it up. That’s how it ended up on the 40 list.

I headed out with a Loblaws bag in my left hand and a latex glove on my right. I wondered if I would find anything since the grass was long, but I need not have worried.

Here’s some of what I picked up:

• 2 cigarette packs (less than I thought)
• 2 coffee cups (Tim Horton’s and generic)
• Tim Horton’s, Burger King and
• Heavy nut and bolt (made me worry for the underside of someone’s car)
• Several straw wrappers
• 1 straw, still wrapped
• Plastic Coke bottle
• Coke cup
• 2 gum packages
• Lots of paper in various stages of decay
• 1 Dairy Queen cup
• 1 plastic spoon (which I like to think belongs to the ice cream cup)
• 4 water bottles

Here’s what I learned:

• Food packaging is ruining the planet. About 90% of what I picked up was food packaging.
• I must stop worrying what other people think. Each time a car (or truck!) drove by, I wondered if they would notice what I was doing. And if they did, would they think it was a good idea or that I was a nut?  Maybe when I reach the wisdom of 40, I’ll realize that nobody is thinking about me anyway.
• When you’ve got a bag of garbage in one hand, and a dirty latex glove on the other… there’s no way to push the hair off your face.

As I reached the home stretch, I found a water bottle filled with brownish-yellow liquid with the lid on it. Naturally I suspected it was pee and I considered leaving it as “too gross” to pick. But I was wearing a glove so I considered it a test of my commitment and I picked it up. Whatever it was, it smelled like peach drink when I poured it out. Luckily, I think it smelled like peach drink.

I noticed when I got back that I had lost my sunglasses. They’d been hanging off my shirt, since they were too loose to stay on my head and wearing them made it difficult to spot the trash. I took the car out to look for them, but with no success.

Unless I find them next time I walk down the road, I actually CONTRIBUTED to the garbage problem on the evening I was trying to remove it. Whoops.

Part of my 40-day countdown is doing things I’ve never done before. I love to eat gnocchi, but I’ve never made it from scratch. Recently I saw a recipe in The Globe and Mail and it seemed pretty easy. So why not try?

I gathered the ingredients – potatoes, flour, egg. Then I invited my mother over to join me, and take pictures! She’s also helping me take care of the bottle of wine I picked up.

Verdict: Making gnocchi is a lot of fun. And quite messy. Eating it was the best part of all.

 Countdown Recap:

#40. Start a blog and tweet
#39. Read a book from childhood
#38. Make gnocchi from scratch

Next up: Garbage picking on Wednesday!

Mashed potatoes, egg and flour… then mix by hand!

Roll the dough into long tubes and then slice with a knife into gnocchi-sized pieces. Also, drink wine while cooking so no matter what happens, ‘it’s all good!’

Vodka sauce, garlic bread and wine rounded out a delicious meal. So proud of myself.

I’m a huge reader. When I was six years old, I learned to read in Grade 1 with Mrs. Ross.

But before I learned to read, I was frustrated by my slow progress. I remember whining loudly to my parents, while sliding dramatically down the wall in the dining room: “I’ll NEVER learn to read!” I was pretty impatient for a six-year-old. I must have known intrinsically that reading and writing would become integral parts of who I am.

Fast forward a few years and I began to read Trixie Belden books. It was a reprint series, more than 30 books in total written by two different authors in the 1950s and 1960s. I loved them. I would get a new one, whether purchased or borrowed from the library, and I would read it. Literally, I would get it, then sit down and read the whole thing through. When I was ten, I could plow through a book in about 6 hours.

Eventually I collected almost the whole series. They’re boring beige paperbacks, but they hold a special place in my heart. Unfortunately they didn’t manage to carve any room in my memory… I only remember one plot line from the entire series.

Thirty years later, this is the one that stuck with me: the story of the fish that lived in complete darkness and therefore evolved to blindness. I didn’t remember the title, but when I scanned my shelf The Mystery at Bob-White Cave seemed promising. I was rewarded five pages in when Trixie read aloud from a magazine article about the fish: “because it was pitch-dark in the caves, gradually, through thousands of years, their eyes became mere mounds of flesh, then disappeared altogether.”

So today, I’m reading a book from childhood that managed to stay with me for three decades.

And as a special treat from my ten-year-old self to my almost-40-year-old-self, on page 20 I found a splatter of what looks to be dried chocolate.

Some things haven’t changed in thirty years. I still love finishing a book almost as much as I love reading it, and I still love chocolate.

Something that looks suspiciously like dried chocolate on page 20.

If you look carefully, you can see three copies of The Mystery at Bob-White Cave, since I started collecting the original hardcovers from auctions and used-book stores.