What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up

I grew up with two big loves in my life: baseball; and make-believe. Was pretty good at both, too. For awhile. In a small community everyone gets known for being something. Some are known for their kindness. Some are known for their brilliance. Some are trouble.

I was known for:

• Not getting into (serious) trouble


• My sense of humor


• Baseball


• My imagination

Not necessarily bad things to be known for. I remember when I worked receiving merchandise at a dock. We had to call in a repairman for our freight scale. The repairman turned out to be one of the "leaders" of my elementary class. He recognized me right off. (I recognized him not at all until he identified himself.) The first thing he said upon confirming my identity was, "I thought you would be playing professional baseball some place by now."

So had I.

Not good enough. The story of my life. [smiles]

The reason I never got into serious trouble was that I was too afraid to join in any group activities - outside of baseball - in the area. I often played alone. There's only so much trouble one can get into playing alone in their own yard. Even when I left the yard it was only to wander in the trees, looking for cool places which bespoke fairies, wizards, dragons, swamp beasts, and all kinds of mythological imaginings. (Found a really cool place along the railroad track. One side was the 'good' side, and the other the habitation of witches and evil things.) Playing alone allowed me to develop my imagination. Strangely, I did not have an imaginary friend. At least two of my sisters did, but not me. It never occurred to me to imagine a friend. I didn't want an imaginary friend. If I couldn't have a real friend I would play alone. Often I did. Until Stephen. But that wasn't until I was fourteen.

I have humor because my family taught me that everything is funny. And by everything I mean everything. God. Sorrow. Pain. School. Politics. Work. Play. Sickness. Injury. Death. Everything was laughed at. I remember the night Daddy died. Nearly all of us were there. He sat up in bed calling to my mother to hurry because "they were here and she was going to be too late." He died in her arms with Mickey on one side of the bed and me on the other. Everyone huddled around Mother to cry. Then she said she needed to call the funeral home. We all walked in one giant huddled mass to the telephone. I remember thinking at the time we must have looked like some comic episode from the old Mary Tyler Moore Show. Even in death we find a reason to laugh. Some hate us for it. To me, it's just the way we are.

I struggled for a long time with what I wanted to be when I "grew up". On the one hand I wanted to play baseball. More than anything, it seemed at times. But I wanted to act on stage and in movies, too. And I had just fallen in love with music. I liked to write stories.

In seventh grade English we were required to write about what we wanted to be and why. I eliminated music right off. I have a voice like beef jerky. "Either you love it, or you hate it." (From the commercial.) My family had already succeeded in convincing me that only "other people" grow up to star in films and stage. They were working on my baseball dream, too, but had yet to finally succeed. So my choices were baseball and writing. (My family didn't know about my writing dream at that time.)

In my concluding paragraph I chose being an Author. Admittedly, this was due in part to the fact that I was writing this paper for an English teacher. It was also because my family's incessant reminders that it didn't matter how good I was at baseball, I would never make it, were getting to me. But Author is what I wanted to be. Back in seventh grade.

I now say writing is my last dream. The final dream for which I have any hope of achieving at all. I find it interesting to realize that it is the only one of my dreams I never shared with my family - until the past ten years or so. Came as a shock to them. They had missed one. Oh, darn it! [haha]

I think that must be why I get so angry when I watch people profile children. "She can't sing!" "He's not good at sports." "She can't draw." "Why is he even wasting his time with that?" I get very, very angry.

I read somewhere that Michael Jordan didn't make his seventh grade basketball team. Didn't Albert Einstein flunk math in elementary school? People have won olympic medals after horrible accidents in which they temporarily lost the use of their legs. A man named Bob Champion won the 1981 Grand National after nearly dying of cancer.

It's bad enough when we profile adults. That's called discrimination. When we do it to children, however, it seems it's called "looking after their best interests." I don't think so. I think we should be teaching all of our children that they can do anything, not nothing. Don't make losers out of children. They never get over it. I know.