Living your bucket list
Watching her quietly do crafts at home, you'd hardly guess what 83-year-old Bobbi Oxford really wants to do. At the top of her bucket list? Driving a race car — a real race car.
"How fast do you want to go?" I asked.
"As fast as I can," Oxford replied. "Maybe 130."
She's been serious about this for some six decades, since, as a teenager, she had to watch the hot cars from the sidelines while her brother went drag racing.
"I would go and see him race," Oxford recalled.
She was not allowed to race herself because of her gender. But times have changed, and Oxford, who retired from her day job at 69, says she has never been more ready to hit the track.
"You're holding the wheel, you're in the car, the motor is running, and you can hear it. That's the adrenaline," she said. "It's purring. It's saying, 'Come on, Bobbi. Let's go.'"
Oxford concedes that not many 83-year-olds share her dream of race car driving, and yet, she's not that unusual. In a recent Stanford University study, nine out of 10 people said they'd made a bucket list, and 15% included something daring.
Maria Leonard Olsen, a 61-year-old attorney-turned-author, is what you might call a professional bucket lister. She started her list more than a decade ago.
"I want to go skydiving," Olsen said, explaining that her fear of heights is part of the activity's appeal. "It's scary. It's something that not everyone will do."
In addition to skydiving Olsen's bucket list includes so much travel that she needs a map to keep it straight. She has hit 70 countries so far and is striving for 100, or 120, which she said "would be even better."
Olsen has already checked off Antarctica, for good.
"I did a polar plunge," she said. "I jumped in the water. It was horrible, I felt terrible. It was insane."
Recalling the feeling of "1,000 needles" being injected into her body at once, Olsen said the experience, although unpleasant, "made me feel alive."
There's a phenomenon as people get older, where they're less fearful and less interested in others' opinions, said Richard Friedman, a psychiatrist at Weill-Cornell in New York City who added: "I think older people are more likely to do what they want."
Friedman has a friend whose 96-year-old mother recently went skydiving. He said chasing thrills is OK at any age, as long as it's done for the right reasons.
"I would simply say, go with the things that you love. Even if you think that they're not all that curious to other people, do them 'cause you want to do them," Friedman said. As for the extent to which an individual's desire to create a bucket list is motivated by their need to show the rest of the world how interesting they are, Friedman suggested, "A fair amount."
"Because we see novelty-seeking as socially desirable," he explained. "So, for example, studies have been done in which people are asked, 'What kinds of foods do you order in restaurants when you're by yourself versus with other people?' And it turns out that people will order more exotic choices when they're around others, in part because they think it's desirable to be open to novelty."
But Oxford's need for speed is real. A day after our interview, she was in full racing regalia at a race track near her Colorado home, with a busload of astonished friends in attendance, too.
Thanks to an AARP program called Wish of a Lifetime, Oxford finally got to put the medal to the metal, in a no-joking-around NASCAR racing vehicle.
"It must have been at least 120 miles an hour. Or, maybe, 75," she said afterward.
At any speed, racing is clearly Oxford's speed. Twenty years from now, Olsen may be right behind her. So, retirees, listen up.
"We are told retirement can be about going off into the sunset and relaxing," Olsen laughed. "But that's not for me. Maybe it will be at some point, but not yet."
