**Smell stargazer lilies and carnations and roses instead of automobile exhaust fumes and unwashed bodies of poor homeless and helpless people wandering the streets downtown.
**Leisurely stroll the grounds at Lady Bird’s Wildflower center or the Natural Gardner, watching butterflies flit from bush to bush, both of us aimless in our destinations, not continue to stumble along broken concrete sidewalks or be bound by the clock on the wall or the one wound around my wrist, hurrying to get nowhere fast.
**Read, read, read - endlessly enchanting, rich novels or cheap, silly, frou-frou magazines of my own choosing, whenever and as long as I’d like, not have to read or watch depressing news, which never seems to change, and which I cannot do anything about anyway.
**Have dinner or tea and crumpets with friends whose company delights me and who honestly really like me, not have to endure another bad hotel meal with hordes of people whom I barely know and who could not care less about me after I leave their sight or they realize I can’t do anything more for them.
**Drive a borrowed Maserati - really fast! - on a winding Italian road - just once - not have to worry over my sensible, paid-for, ten-year-old Toyota Camry, which may decide to conk out on me at any moment no matter how much I’ve spent trying to maintain it.
**Ride horseback on a beautiful beach somewhere at sunset. Or just be on a beach somewhere - anywhere! - with my toes digging into the wet sand as I amble along, looking for shells and sea glass, listening to seagulls calling above me and smelling the salty air and feeling comforting, wet waves lapping up to greet me.
**Go to sappy chick flicks and cry shamelessly and eat as much buttered popcorn as I want and not have to share it with anybody.
**Love to be loved, truly loved by my own big, strong, selfless, teddy bear of a man, with a heart of gold and no addictions other than to me, and no other agenda in his brain or in his pants.
**See my grandsons with big, happy smiles on their shiny young faces and know they have enough food to eat and are reasonably happy, safe and secure, not worry about their mental state over their parents imminent divorce and whether or not my daughter will be able to pay her bills and feed them.
**Have friends and associates of every color and creed, any and all political persuasions, with whom I can talk freely and express our varied, different views without vitriol and bias and hate and cynicism, or someone having to be all Right or all Left or all Wrong.
**Travel the country in a nice, comfortable little RV, visiting my friends along the way and making new ones, visiting national and state parks and staying in campgrounds, sitting by a campfire under the stars, wrapped in a quilt and sipping brandy.
**Be guiltlessly proud of my country and not hear negative remarks being made by her own citizens or those abroad who do not have any idea of what it means to be an American. I’d like to know that the taxes I have paid will go for good purpose, not another useless war in an ungrateful foreign country, or to bail out a company that should never have been in business in the first place, especially when I might need that money to bail out myself or my own family.
**Be able to retire on what little money I do have and take care of myself, go to the doctor when I need to and not have to rely on the charity of others. But I’d like to know that true charity does exist, just for it’s own sake, not the tax break it will provide.
**Never have to pay taxes again. But I’d also like to live forever, and that ain’t going to happen either.
