Fifty-three-year-old Paul Kelly, his buddy Paul Smith and Kelly’s twenty-something son and daughter stand out at the front of the line, backed by a rowdy throng of fellow adventurers — and staring into the eyes of 21 hungry 1,500-pound bulls.

Being held on a dusty stretch of private land just south of the Buffalo Chip Saloon, it’s the first Cave Creek Running of the Bulls.

Decked out in the matching traditional garb of the original bull runners in Pamplona, Spain — white shirt and trousers, red waistband, neckerchief, beret — the foursome lead the pack from the rear, as the gate rises and the bulls charge out onto the makeshift quarter-mile track for the first of four runs on this warm Saturday afternoon.

After a brisk but, relative to Pamplona, tame chase from the fairly domesticated, rodeo-trained bulls, the quartet gather at the beer tent at the center of the track to celebrate yet another milestone.

All around the beer garden, packs of fellow thrill seekers, all over the age of 50, slap one another on the back, catching their breath with the same phrase: “Well, that’s one more thing I can scratch off my bucket list!”

But for Kelly and Smith, it’s just practice.

“One of the things on our bucket lists is to do the actual running of the bulls in Spain,” says Paul Kelly, pointing to himself and his buddy, the taller Paul. “So we figured we would do this first as a warm-up, since it was right in our hometown. And next year, we plan on going to Pamplona.”

Together and, frequently, along with their kids, the two pals regularly check a number of items off their “bucket lists,” a term popularized by the 2007 movie starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as a mismatched pair of terminally ill men on an around-the-world trek to try everything on Freeman’s list of things to do before he “kicks the bucket.”

Dismissed by critics but influencing everything from websites like Bucketlist.org, to Bill Clinton sharing his own list at a 2010 International AIDS Conference (tops on the former president’s list: “Climb Kilimanjaro before the snows melt” and “Live to see my own grandchildren”), the bucket list has arguably become as emblematic to today’s aging boomers as another Nicholson film, Easy Rider, was to them four decades ago, and Kelly and Smith, with their matching panache and gusto-grabbing aspirations, could be the movement’s new Capt. America and Billy.

“We’ve gone skydiving, we’ve bungee-jumped,” Kelly says.

“Gone white-water rafting, cliff diving,” Smith adds.

“We’ve always been daredevils,” Kelly says. “Always kind of pushing the envelope.”

What’s different about this bucket-busting bro-mance, however, is that the kids are along for the ride. Kelly’s son Joshua, in matching beret, says he heard about the Cave Creek Running of the Bulls first but can’t remember who talked who into signing up.

For Kelly’s college-aged kids, having a bucket list dad is something they clearly enjoy.

“On the bucket list now, it’s either daring stuff or it’s parties that we want to go to,” Paul Kelly says, with a laugh. “We’ve done Mardi Gras, but we haven’t done Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. There’s Oktoberfest in Germany . . .”

“Burning Man!” suggests Joshua.

Grandparental Trendsetters

A funny thing happened on the way to older Americans accomplishing everything on their bucket lists: their kids and grandkids stole the idea, taking Grandma and Grandpa’s renewed spirit of adventure as improbable inspiration for their own life course.

Walking through the crowd after the first round of the Cave Creek Running of the Bulls, the younger participants talk about crossing out another adventure on their own bucket lists, which seems just a little, well, premature to be charting a final act before fully launching a first.

“It’s all about doing epic stuff in life,” explains one young man, surrounded by admiring females and hoisting a beer. He seems to have adopted as his hero the weathered Dos Equis pitchman, heralded in commercials as The Most Interesting Man In The World. “And it’s never too early to start working on that!”

Savvy marketers are beginning to pick up on the trend. Stephen Hahn-Griffiths, a senior advertising strategist at Leo Burnett Chicago, blogs that today’s Millennials care more about accumulating life experiences than material goods, and aim to grow their personal currency throughout their all-important social networks by simply doing awesome things. For this generation, Hahn-Griffiths says, “success is more likely to be defined by sampling a rich array of life experiences — including culture, travel, innovation, sustainability and the environment.” The travel industry has already taken note: according to research by hospitality marketing firm TIG Global, Millennials — those born between 1977 and 1995, and grandkids to those over 50 — now account for 12 percent of the nation’s leisure travel market.

MTV has capitalized on the trend as well with its reality show The Buried Life, which recently wrapped up its second season. In the show, two brothers and two of their friends travel across America in a big purple bus completing their own list of “100 things to do before you die” — and, in an altruistic twist, helping strangers along the way complete one of their own. So far, the adventures have been a bit sophomoric: season two opened with “No. 50: Streak a Stadium and Get Away With It.” But they did, in their second visit to the White House, get to shoot hoops with President Obama — wish No. 95.

The inspiration for this new bucket-list youth movement? Their feisty parents and grandparents, who’ve shown them that when it comes to accumulating friends and awesome experience points, there’s no beating seniors on a bucket list spree. An ad by Saatchi & Saatchi for Toyota shows a pale young girl glued to her laptop, chiding her parents for only having 19 Facebook friends — interspersed with scenes of her high-spirited parents grabbing bicycles off their Venza’s roof rack to go mountain biking with another vivacious couple.

Sometimes the youngsters can’t even keep up with their daring elders. Jean Pettit, a retiree at the Freedom Plaza independent living center, took her first skydive two summers ago, at age 84. It was a 13,400-foot freefall over the Eloy desert and ended up landing her on the big screen in Times Square as well as in news clips alongside former President George H.W. Bush, who completed his second skydiving attempt, at age 85.

Pettit says her feat, now beautifully preserved on YouTube, inspired others around her retirement community to go for their own outrageous adventures.

“There were a couple of other people here who said they were going to try it,” she says, mentioning friends Jinny Faux, who co-piloted a glider plane over Lake Pleasant at age 85, and Audrey Starks, who’s ridden in both a glider and a hot air balloon. But so far, her own children, now scattered from Orlando, Fla., to Chattanooga, Tenn., have been reluctant to follow her lead.

“My son says he’s happiest with both feet on the ground,” she says, with a laugh. “And my daughter is a social worker, so she’s pretty grounded herself. I don’t think either of them have any desire to do what I did. But I loved it!”

Little Feats

Perhaps the downside of making bucket lists is that eventually, we all begin to glimpse the bucket.

This past July, 91-year-old Sylvia Clayton of Tucson accepted an invitation to pilot a Cessna airplane. The former WWII flying WASP, who also worked after the war as an aircraft engine mechanic, reveled in the opportunity to once again take to the skies, circling down on a low fly-by to wave at all her friends from the Fountains at La Cholla Assisted Living Center who’d come to watch.

But on this day, Clayton is not at all lucid, and attempts to draw her out in a conversation about the flight result, sadly, in confusion. “She has her good days and her bad days,” says a caretaker, quietly. “And she took a fall this morning.”

Even the still hearty Jean Pettit admits she’s had to postpone some of the remaining things on her list — parasailing, scuba diving and swimming with the porpoises — until she recovers from a back injury, which she stresses was not related to the skydiving.

“It runs in the family,” she says. “The doctor told me that it would be a year or two before I would have my back normal again. But I’ve still got things on my list. When this back straightens out, I’ll think about tackling those adventures, too.”

Fortunately, a grandparent doesn’t have to risk life and limb to bond with their loved ones. Klaus Bolle, owner and operator of the Bolle Adult Swim School in southeast Phoenix, says he meets seniors every day whose No. 1 bucket list goal is simply learning how to keep up with their grandchildren in the pool.

“The CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] says that one in four adults in America do not know how to swim,” says the 67-year-old German-born instructor, who says his 30 years of teaching has been put to use in training more than 30,000 older adults, at an average age of 65, how to swim in just six days.

“The problem is, if you have a room filled with 100 adults and you ask who can’t swim, nobody will come forward,” he says. “Because they’re embarrassed and they won’t admit it.”

Nevertheless, mastering swimming is tops on most Arizona grandparents’ bucket lists.

“Often they come because their grandchildren want them to swim, and they can’t,” Bolle says. “They are afraid that if something happens to their grandkids, they can’t even go into the pool to help them. And the other reason they want to learn is for the health benefits. Swimming is the best thing you can do to stay healthy.”

That alone, Bolle says, can give older adults the stamina and energy to try some of the other things on their bucket lists. And maybe inspire the grandkids to start compiling their own lists of epic life experiences early. ■