Childhood Dreams

In honor of Throw Back Thursday, I am going rewind my life to when I was a young girl. 

Me at age 10

As a young child I had thousands of dreams of what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I wanted to be a model, an actress, a ballerina, a veterinarian, a police officer, a firefighter, a nurse, the lists went on and on.  It is amazing to me this young child had all these grandiose ideas of what she wanted to be when she grew up, but now as a woman in my 30’s, she sits behind a desk doing computer work all day.  I am sure the 10-year-old me would be very disappointed at my choices of a career.  The 10-year-old me probably wanted to be an astronaut, not an office worker.  That little girl and I still have a few things in common.  I still dream about and wonder what I will be, when I “grow up”.  I know my position as an office worker is just a temporary stent in the course of my career.  I have dreams now of shedding the daily 9-5 for something away from a computer desk, but only time will tell if that dream is to go by the wayside like the dreams of being an actress (I have terrible stage fright, loathe speaking to large groups and couldn’t memorize lines if my life depended on it!) or if they will one day come into fruition.

 

Me at age 32

There is however one career dream that little girl had that still is a dream of the older, taller version.  When I was child I dreamed about being a writer.  I wanted to create stories, bound into those wonderful volumes that crowded the book cases in my room.  Just opening one of those books transported you into a different time and world.  If I ever had a hero as a child, it would have been the elusive author.  I dreamed of sitting in an office with plants and stacks of paper from my manuscript.  It was the life!  Sitting around with nothing but my thoughts and a typewriter. (When I was young we didn’t have a computer at home, but had an electric word-processor)

 

There was an old man who lived in my town; I had heard he was a writer.  I grew up in a very small town, population less than 300.  I knew this man and I used to ride my bike past his house nearly every day.  I recall they owned two houses right next to each other one was on the corner.  It was the one I imagined was his writing office.  I remember riding my bike past that house, looking in the windows, like most kids did.  On the western side of the house (facing the road) there was a desk pushed up against the window.  I think there was a computer or typewriter sitting there as well.  I vividly remember there being a box of computer paper sitting under the desk with the ream of it stretched up feed either a printer or word-processor on the desk.  It was that old paper that was connected with perforated lines you tear apart to separate the pages and the binding from the edges.

If I were this man I would have made that my writing room too.  That particular window looked across the street into empty lots.  The “block” over was where town basically ended.  He looked straight into the sunset everyday, across a field of grass that probably grew wildflowers, into a farm field.  I could see how that view could have been very peaceful and inspiring for someone who was sitting down to write.

To this day I have no clue what this man wrote, or even if was in fact a writer.  He went to the same church as I, but I never spoke to him because he was “old” and intimidating.  The man passed away at 79 years old in 2002, so it might always be a mystery to for my brain to attempt to discover.  I asked my mother about him and she doesn’t remember hearing he was a writer.  I am not sure where I had gotten my information as a small child, perhaps I made it up upon seeing the desk and paper.  Either way the idea of a person sitting down at a desk writing a book, has stuck with me as I grew up.

Hopefully one day I will be able to make that 10-year-old child’s dream come true and publish a book.