WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE…

(This one isn't fiction.)


A football.
That's right. When I grow up I want to be a football. It says so right there in black and white, in the shaky hand of a third-grade student who happened to be me a long time ago. It's part of an irreplaceable chronicle called "My School Years," in which are archived the class pictures, report cards and various statistics of my grade school years. And there on the back page of the third-grade section I declared to the world what it was I wanted to be when I grow up. Not a fireman. Not a policeman. Not even a cowboy, astronaut or soldier. Nope. I marked the box with the blank line and wrote down the word 'football' in fat, uneven letters.

Now it doesn't take a genius or child psychologist to figure out that what I was really trying to say back then was I wanted to be a football player. I simply ran out of room to fit in the other key word. (God, I hope that really was what happened.) Nothing unusual about a young boy dreaming of being a football star. All I needed to work on was my throwing arm and/or my penmanship a little more.

Anyway, I came across this forgotten footnote recently and it got me to thinking: Why is it that some people know early on what they want to do with their life – or at least have a pretty good idea, while others struggle for years to find their 'calling'? Indeed many never find it at all. What triggers that light bulb to turn on for some and not for others? Is it Divine Intervention? Destiny? The way our particular molecules of DNA happen to wrap around each other? Or something more mundane like good education or plain old good luck? I know hard work fits in there somewhere, too, but doesn't that come after the fact?

That's not to say that anyone has an easier road just because they know what they want to do. We all have our struggles, our highs and lows, our dead ends. No free passes when it comes to that. Nor should there be. And certainly not everyone needs that 'aha' moment in order to lead a productive and fulfilling life. It just stands to reason that much like someone taking a long vacation trip, those who know ahead of time where they want to go have an advantage over those who just get in the car and start driving.

The truth is I'm still looking for some road signs.

I write these words not as a former football star, but rather as a man of steadily growing years who is still learning, still searching, still wondering: What do I want to be when I grow up? And again I am trusting that my vision can reach a little higher than wanting to be a fully inflated genuine leather pigskin.

By the way, according to my fourth-grade entry my focus had shifted to wanting to be a scientist. Yeah, that one turned out real good, too.