Once Upon A Time

Once upon a time a child was born. Wait. Maybe that statement is a little too obtuse. Hundreds, maybe thousands of children have been born at a lot of different times, so I guess I should be more acute.

On June 11th, 1965, I was born. Yeah, that sounds better.

Anyway, this child (me) had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. His parents didn’t give him any suggestions. Not that it mattered; he was still too young to understand their language. The only words he could comprehend at that time were “Baba” and “Ewww”, the latter one he realized was the word they used when they changed his diaper on certain occasions.

As the child grew older (I’m still talking about me) he began watching television and reading comic books. Certain shows did inspire him (me), such as Superman and Batman, The Flintstones, and Gunsmoke. I (the child) even had a little leather vest with a sheriff’s badge on it and a pair of replica six shot revolvers strapped to my waist. I would walk down the streets searching for any bad guys who might have strayed into to my town looking for trouble. And there were plenty of bad hombres who dared to mess with me, but a single loud bang from my cap gun quickly sent them up to Boot Hill.

When it came to comic books, Spiderman was a major influence on me. Superman and Batman were old hat. But the idea of being an unknown crime fighter who could spin webs and hang criminals in a cocoon three stories high was great! God bless you, Stan Lee!

But like most children, I gradually grew older. The days of listening to “Baba” and “Ewww” were gone, and the child became a teenager. His juvenile dreams of getting it on with Miss Kitty and having shootouts on main street at noon in Dodge City could only be left to his imagination, as well as web-spinning his way through the dark alleys of Forest Hills, Queens, and having little Peter Parkers with that cute little red head, Mary Jane Watson.

To paraphrase the great Nobel Prize winning Bob Dylan, ‘The times, they were a-changin’.

High school in the early 80s did nothing to help this poor child decide what he wanted to do with his life. The world was moving faster than he was, and instead of trying to keep up with it, he figured he’d just sit back and party while watching this new technology take over the world.

An old wise man once said…something really wise.

The child did have one dream in his subconscious though. In his early childhood he read a book, and it took him to a world he never knew existed: a land of chocolate, Oompa Loompas, and a snotty little girl by the name of Veronica Beauregarde.

Side note: I never ate a blueberry again after that.

But to make a short story long, I did grow up. When that child attained the ripe old age of 45, he finally realized his childhood dream. He wanted to be a writer! By now, millions of words and thousands of worlds had taken him to places no one could imagine, and it was a welcome escape for the years he spent with nowhere else to go.

And he remembered something else that old wise man once said:

YOU CAN BE ANYTHING YOU WANT TO BE

That child can’t say he’s become what he wants to be, but his name does hang in a museum above a newspaper article he wrote about a baseball glove in McCloud, California.

Was my dream fulfilled?

I think I have a couple of years left to finish "Penny And Nickel" .

And if this child can do that, then I think he can become whatever he wants to be.