My Bucket's Got A Hole In It

One of the tenets of life drilled into me by my dear old Mum is, “Grow ‘til ya go.”  When I was six years old, I thought it meant that I was still a little person, but if I ate the right food, I would grow up to be big and strong. At 17 and entering college, I still didn’t get it (but I knew what PART I wanted to see grow). Even after college, the immediate thought of constantly learning was not one that I embraced. When will I ever be done learning?  Now, as I approach the September of my years (and, obviously, still able to wax poetic), I finally get it. We will always be learning something. Close that door; the mystery of life has been solved!  Wait. What’s that? Another door just opened and on the nameplate it says, “OK, now what?”

That is the bigger question, you know?  If I have finally come to terms with the fact that I will constantly be in the learning mode, what should I learn next? I have wrestled with that problem for a long time.  In fact, there were times, when I reviewed my day, that I could honestly say I didn’t learn anything. Mom was right. I felt like I had cheated myself. It was then that I decided to take baby steps and I made a compact with myself that any day I ended up going to bed smarter than when I had woken up, was a good day.  At times, I really had to stretch my self-imposed criteria to come up with something new that I mastered. For several weeks, I took the easy way out and decided I was going to learn all about the seven remote controls sitting on my living room coffee table. I never said that what I learned had to be earth shattering, but I will tell you this (with chest proudly puffed up in braggadocio mode) every time I hear some standup comedian joke about VCRs still flashing 00:00... 00:00... 00:00, I LAUGH in his face.  That serves two purposes. First my guffaws let the comedian think he is actually funny, and secondly, it allows me to secretly bask in the knowledge that I am better than those people whose VCRs ARE still flashing 00:00... 00:00... 00:00. Somewhere in my darkest soul, the echo chamber is queued and I am letting a diabolical laugh rise to the surface.  Buh-WA-HA-HA-HA-HA

Last Thursday, I was struggling trying to come up with something that I had learned.  I had, long ago, amended my compact to say that LEARNING that you didn’t know something about something did NOT qualify for having learned something. I will give you a moment to reread that last sentence. Go ahead, read it again if you want.  So, there I was having discovered I didn’t know something and so far, I have not been able to find the answer.  I am hoping that one of you will have a clue. What is this conundrum? Namely, the word, “Bucket” is a reserved word in Visual FoxPro. My question to you, dear reader, is WHY?  I discovered this fact when I was writing a SQL statement that included a calculated field that I named, Bucket. Each time I typed Bucket, my editor capitalized it and turned it blue (the sure-fire sign it was a reserved word).  Sure enough, after checking the list of reserved words, it was confirmed.  I will also tell you that finding the word, Bucket, in the list of reserved words was the ONLY, repeat, ONLY place in the entire VFP Help file where I found the word.

If any of you would want to offer a possible answer, as Dumbo, once said, “I am all ears.”  I will warn you that one of my VFP buddies, Lister Potter, came up with the definitive answer as far as I am concerned, so you better really have a good response to top his.  Wise old Lister suggested that since Microsoft had announce it would no longer be supporting VFP, that they have secretly added a BUCKET for VFP to “kick” when 2015 rolls around.  Makes sense to me.  In the meantime, I am going to set my daily learning goal a bit higher and try to find out why people find Howie Mandel funny.