This Winter Day / Career Planning

This Is the Kind of Winter Day...

December 1, 2006

Another take on that Soft Cream sign I like so much,
taken that deeply foggy day in December. (Like this one.)

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My eldest son asked me the other night, "What did you want to be when you grew up?"

It was a good question. I was disappointed that I didn't have a good answer.

I know how my son answers that question: he plans to be a video game beta-tester. It sounds to him like the perfect job, getting paid to play the latest games. I have what is probably the typical parent reaction: You'd better have something to fall back on.

I told my son that when I was really young I probably told people that I wanted to be a fire-fighter. He knew that was a lame answer and came back with, "But when you were my age, what did you want to be?" The best I could seem to remember was that I liked drawing, and I probably wanted to be a cartoonist. It still felt like a fake answer.

I also remember that there were times I dreamed about being an astronaut -- especially of how cool it would be to float in weightless space. But I started wearing glasses in the sixth grade. And I remember hearing that astronauts had to have perfect vision. I also heard that the grapes at NASA are sour.

What *did* I want to be when I grew up? Maybe I just don't remember what was on my mind at that time. I don't have very clear memories of much of my growing-up years. Mostly foggy impressions, not many vivid movies I can replay in my mind. These days I'm conscious of avoiding the "be when you grow up" question, so as to avoid the impression that career is the most important thing. But back then, that's the question adults most often asked kids, right? So I must have had a stock answer. Either I didn't have an answer, or the answer I was giving didn't leave a lasting impression on me, because it wasn't a deeply-felt and genuine belief. Probably the latter.

Can I blame the generation I grew up in? The pervading, 'Sesame Street' message I absorbed was, "You can be anything you want to be, and do anything you want to do!" [So I guess I wanted to be lazy and self-centered.] That freedom/hippie generation before us reacted against ideas like 'it's your role to follow in the family business, like your father and your grandfather did.' So the pendulum swung hard in the opposite direction. We ended up with a complete lack of guidance and structure. "Be anything you want to be" might work for some people. But really, freedom without structure is chaos.

And now, irony of ironies, one of the things I wish I could do most is what my dad did: photography. OK, I don't really want to follow his path and do the jobs he had. The work he did was mostly on the technical side, and most of the photo-talk I remember hearing from him in those days was about the mechanics and the equipment. But at least he was in the business. And he was always taking photos, mostly as family documentarian but sometimes for hire. So somehow it's closer.

I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. But that's OK, because I haven't grown up yet. -=-