When I Grow Up
Kids spend a lot of time talking about what they want to be when they grow up. Or, at least they used to. I suppose it’s possible that this particular topic of conversation has fallen out of vogue sometime in the past decade or two. So perhaps I should say that, when I was a fledgling human—back in the age before dinosaurs—this subject came up pretty often. I talked about it with other kids, and with grownups. For some reason, adults loved to ask the question… What do you want to be when you grow up?
I had an answer, of course. Or rather, I had a series of answers which changed over time, as my picture of the world grew and evolved. According to my mother, when I was about three years old, my life’s ambition was to become a big cuddly lion. Apparently my plan was to wander from house-to-house, playing with all the children I met along the way. I don’t actually remember harboring the ambition to be an itinerant feline playmate, but I must trust to Mom’s memory of those days, which is presumably better than mine.
I do remember my next major career aspiration, though. At age four, I wanted to be a dump truck. Not a dump truck driver, mind you. A truck. A red one, with a yellow tilt bed, and big black tires. I have no idea how I planned to accomplish the transformation from human child to heavy equipment, but I wasn’t going to let minor technical details get in the way of my bright future as a piece of earth-moving machinery.
Alas, that dream also faded. Over the next couple of years, my career path of-choice changed more often than the weather. I wanted to be an inventor, a racecar driver, a zookeeper, a pirate, a stage magician, an astronaut, and a secret agent. I’m not sure if my visions of espionage were inspired by Maxwell Smart’s shoe-phone, or by Secret Squirrel’s machinegun-cane and cannon-hat. (That hat was pretty damned cool!)
But I didn’t figure out what I really wanted to do with my life until after my father passed away, when I was seven. Dad was a great storyteller. He made up wonderful stories about a chocolate milk drinking bear named Oliver, and his best friend: a little boy named Charlie. (My father’s first name was Charles, and his middle name was Oliver. I was twelve or thirteen years old before it dawned on me that Dad had named both of his main characters after himself.)
Oliver the Bear and Charlie had many strange adventures together, nearly all of which ended in humorous catastrophes of one sort of another. I loved those stories, and when my father died, I saw it as my duty to keep Oliver the Bear alive.
About a year later—when I was entertaining my little brother, Eric, with an Oliver the Bear adventure—I suddenly realized that I couldn’t remember how the story was supposed to end. It was the greatest tragedy I could imagine. I was actually forgetting my father’s stories! I knew immediately what I had to do. I had to write those stories down. I had to get them on paper, so they would never be lost.
The next day, I talked Mom into buying me a spiral notebook. When I got it home, I ran straight to my room and reached for a pencil. About half-way into the first paragraph, it hit me… This was it! This was the thing I had been born for. Not racecars. Not spy craft. Not outer space. This was my future: writing stories for other people to read.
I can still remember the blue cardboard cover of the spiral notebook, and the feel of the Number 2 pencil in my hand—the eraser ferule dented by tooth marks from my tendency to gnaw on writing implements. The visions in my head were not images of glory or commercial success. I didn’t picture myself on the New York Times best seller list. I was eight years old; I don’t think I knew that the best seller list existed. I didn’t imagine book signings, or fame, or wealth. I wasn’t even sure that a person could get paid for this whole writing thing. None of that mattered to me. I just wanted to write. I knew that I had found my calling, and that I would continue to pursue it for the rest of my life.
More than four decades have passed since the evening of that quiet revelation. Along the way, I had a long and successful career in the military, and I’ve dabbled in several civilian professions. But my true calling has always been the written word.
Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I had never decided to write down the Oliver the Bear stories. Would I have eventually stumbled into writing anyway? Is there something in my internal nature which would have ultimately drawn me toward the desire to write, even without the impetus of my father’s stories?
I’m not sure. Perhaps my life would have gone in a completely different direction. Who can say? I still think I would have made a pretty good dump truck.