By the time I was my Seconda’s age, my mother had drummed it into my head that there was only one appropriate response to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and that was “Physician.” Not even “doctor,” mind you, since I guess that’s too broad a term, under whose umbrella might fall (God forbid!) getting a Ph.D. No, I was going to be a “physician.” We all see how fruitful my mother’s programming was. I literally cannot tell you the difference between a liver and a kidney, except that you have two kidneys so they probably aren’t as important.
Because I am nothing like my mother (please see “You sound like your mother”), I have never given the children the slightest hint as to what I’d like to see them doing twenty, thirty years down the line. (Except of course, that I expect them to be living next door to me, and that’s a deal-breaker, non-negotiable). In fact, one of my favorite things to hear them talk about is their delightfully half-baked, wildly improbable future employment trajectory. I think my kids would write their generation’s “What Color is Your Parachute?”
So it gives me extreme pleasure to announce to you their most recent career aspirations. And since everything sounds a little more impressive in haiku form, I have masterfully modified their quotes to fit.
Primo, the entrepreneur
When I grow up I
Will open a restaurant
On Pluto -“Moonies.”
Seconda, the hedonist
When I grow up, I
Am going to eat gum and
Have an elephant.
And you, readers? What were your most deeply-felt or hare-brained career aspirations as a kid?
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