When I was a kid, I was ripe with hope and ambition. I remember the feeling well. I could be anything. I would not be constrained by my small town, not by my farming upbringing; neither by finances nor by capabilities. Everything was possible. My heart was in my dream. And Fate, it had been promised, was kind.

Things I thought I could be:

1. A reincarnated, but now that I think of it, just an incarnated cartoon boy. That is, I wanted to come back to life in my next life as a cartoon boy, and a specific cartoon boy, Keyop from Battle of the Planets.
2. Somebody’s dad.
3. A lawyer.
4. A teenaged detective. With a passing friend we had a passing headquarters and passed a little time trying this out. There was not nearly enough illicit activity, sadly, to sustain a detective business.
5. A writer.
6. An artist.
7. Somebody famous.
8. An intrepid explorer. I was determined, for example, to be the one who proved the idea that you could, after all, dig through to China.
9. A cook. I used to make all sorts of horrible concoctions. I would name them and try to serve them all pretty. There was a marshmallow-chocolate thing I made inside of tinfoil wrapper that I was sure was going to be my signature piece.
10. A scientist. I was sure I was going to invent something that everybody would want. I missed out on: bottled water, cell phones, the internet, digital cameras, video games.
11. An actor. I performed one man plays out in the barn with cattle as my audience. Or on top of large bales of hay for the stripped fields.
12. A homeowner. I had designed a dozen houses that I expected to live in by the time I was a dozen years old.
13. A superhero. For a much longer period of time than is likely natural, I earnestly believed that I would somehow manage to be a superhero. It was not terribly different in motivation, I suppose, than earnestly believing I could be reincarnated as a cartoon chracter.

That hope, that potential has mostly leaked out of me. And I have not accomplished any of these things. Not in earnest anyway. And perhaps, after all, Jiminy lied to me. My heart was in my dream. But my request was, as it turns out, too extreme. For all of my wishing, for all of my dreaming, Fate, so far, is unkind.

SS