Ever since the movie came out in 2007, we’ve all heard people talking about their bucket lists: Things they hope to do before they “kick the bucket.” Or maybe you’ve made such a list yourself. I don’t know how long – or if _ the term “bucket list” existed before the film (which I didn’t see; I’m not a Jack Nicholson fan). Most people probably called it a life-wish list or something.

I have a friend who, on her birthday each year, writes down a list of things she wants/hopes to do, and the number has to correspond to however old she is. So she was 50 this year, and listed 50 things. Some of these are “huge” things that she might never do (scale Everest and such), some are very small (finally paint that damn chair on the back porch) and some are the same year-to-year, such as “walk my dogs more” or “listen better to my patients.”

Rather than her list getting smaller as she does things, it gets longer every year. This is a type of ambition rather alien to me.
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There was a place called “Serendipity Cycles” in the park in Spokane, Wash., that caught my eye 10 years ago. I mentioned it in a March 2001 column for espn.com that previewed all the NCAA Elite Eight women’s basketball games but focused on the one I was covering in person: Southwest Missouri State vs. Washington.

What I wrote then was:

OK, to get from the ESPN2-less media hotel to the Spokane Arena, one goes through Riverside Park and across two bridges, past a carousel and a not-open bicycle rental place called “Serendipity Cycles.” Now, wouldn’t it be nice if serendipity did come in cycles? You wouldn’t have to have it all the time, just as long as you knew it was coming around again.

I was in Spokane again this March, but I didn’t see Serendipity Cycles. It might still be there and I just missed it. Or it may be gone. A lot can change, of course, in a decade.
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(Note from MV: I wrote on Feb. 14 about the anniversary of the 1961 plane crash that killed the U.S. figure skating team on its way to the World Championships in Prague, and how that event had prompted some essays I’d written over the last decade. Here is another. The documentary “Rise” is replaying in theaters on March 7, and there also will be a subsequent DVD release.)

Whenever I get frustrated about sexism and “glass” ceilings these days in the United States, I always try to take a breath and think about how things were just 50 years ago.

That is the period chronicled in the documentary “Rise,” which looks at the lives of those who died in a 1961 plane crash that killed the entire United States Figure Skating team’s travelling party on its way to the World Championships in Prague.

The woman who was considered a matriarch of the sport at that time, Maribel Vinson Owen, perished in the accident along with her two national-champion daughters. The film does a very good job portraying that family’s dynamics, and the struggles that Vinson Owen had as a working woman with great ambition and drive at a time when those qualities were discouraged in females.

She was born in 1911, so she was a young adult in the 1930s, when the Great Depression still hovered over the nation, and into 1940s, when World War II’s demand for soldiers meant American women moved in unprecedented numbers into jobs that previously were almost always the domain of men.

By the 1950s, Vinson Owen’s against-the-grain personality was firmly established, and she had two children to support after her ex-husband’s death. The 1950s backlash against the gains women had made in all endeavors had somewhat less of an effect on Vinson Owen, I would theorize, because she was already who she was.

But what about women who were a generation younger than her and came of age in the 1950s and early ‘60s?
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(Note from MV: I wrote on Feb. 14 about the anniversary of the 1961 plane crash that killed the U.S. figure skating team on its way to the World Championships in Prague, and how that event had prompted some essays I’d written over the last decade. Sorry for the delay in posting, but here is the first.)

“If she went into a room that was dark, she’d be the light bulb.”

_ Mike Michelson on his sister, Rhode

The coastline in Wilmington, Calif., is quite different than the beautiful, languid beaches just to the north or south in greater Los Angeles. This is an industrial area, one of refineries, docks, cargo and backaches. This is business, not pleasure.

When Phineus Banning helped settled the area in the mid-1800s, he named it after his hometown in Delaware and helped develop one of the largest and busiest seaports in the world.

Nearby are his family home _ a small oasis _ and a high school named after him. A few miles east in Long Beach is McHelen Avenue, from where you can’t see the ugly, endless jungle of pipes, tanks and gigantic crates that clog the shore.

On McHelen, you’re in a neatly kept, working-class Southern California neighborhood with stucco-finished homes dating back to the ’30s and ’40s and painted a variety of colors.

The home at 21808 McHelen is tan, and you can imagine that once, there was an energetic little girl running around inside this house, getting into everything, exhausting her mother.

Or, at least I can imagine this because of what I’d been told about Rhode Lee Michelson from the people who knew her, all of whom seem to have exceptionally vivid memories of her. She would grow up to go to Banning High School, but she wouldn’t finish there. Her life would end during her senior year.
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It was January in Greensboro, N.C. _ and a mecca of figure skating this is not. The most important sport in this city is ACC basketball, and that’s what often has filled the Greensboro Coliseum.

Still, a decent-sized crowd came to stay late on a school night, a Thursday, to see the women’s short program of the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.

Three young women later sat at a podium, having placed 1-2-3 that evening, setting themselves up for a showdown in the long program two nights later. One of them earlier had been asked about her very active Twitter account, and she responded, “I do that so you guys can quote me.”

Later, as I walked to my car while appreciating weather that felt comparatively warm, my mind traveled back in time. It was quite cold in Colorado Springs that January night 50 years ago when a group of talented people unknowingly sealed their tragic fate by performing well in competition.

The skaters who competed at figure skating’s national championships back then had no notion of a “short” program – it didn’t exist as part of competition until 1973 – and, of course, wouldn’t have been able to conceive of Twitter.

How about professional skaters being eligible for the Olympics? Women skaters routinely doing triple-triple combinations? A complex, points-accumulating scoring system no longer based on 6.0s? All would be in the future _ something the top skaters at the 1961 nationals didn’t have much of left.

No other U.S. sport has been so irrevocably changed by a few horrifying, heartbreaking minutes. That’s how long it took for the plane’s loss of control while attempting to land, its subsequent plunge, the impact and the explosion.

At 10:05 a.m. on Feb. 15, 1961, the 18 members of the U.S. figure skating team _ en route to the World Championships in Prague, Czechoslovakia _ died when a Sabena 707 jet crashed in a field near the airport in Brussels, Belgium. Also killed were 16 relatives, officials and coaches accompanying them.
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