I was looking at old photographs last week. I could look at photos all day long, which is why all my photo albums are in the closet and I rarely allow myself to look at my Google Photos during the week.
But there I was staring at me, cute as a button, at eight years old.
I was tapping my head with my finger. If only there was a plan. If only I would have had some inkling of what was to come. I should have had a plan and stuck by it.
But then it hit me. Who has a life plan at eight years old? I mean, it was 1969. I was in third grade. I know I was in third grade because I looked on Facebook and saw an old friend posted our third-grade class picture.
Looking back, my only goal was to make it to the fourth grade and to get my mother to drive me to Sam Goody so I could purchase the Archies Greatest Hits.
“Steven, just tell your brother to get it for you on Saturday when he goes there with his friends.”
My brother was in the ninth grade and explaining to his pot-smoking friends why he was buying Abbey Road and the Archies might explain why he dropped the album on my bed upon his return and slammed his door.
That ever-popular question, “So, Steven, what do you want to be when you grow up?” would arise every now and again. It was usually at family gatherings on holidays.
The common answer for boys was a fireman. So, I went with that. I do not understand why, but it required very little thought. If the guy I sat next to in class said it in school and nobody laughed, it was a winner.
I mean, it’s not like when we arrived home my parents sat me down to discuss supporting a family, and why I wanted to fight fires, or if I had thought about any other careers. It’s not like every day I asked myself, what was I doing, what career was I building, what dream was I working toward? As if not having a profound answer to any of those things guaranteed my failure in life.
Considering our career path usually isn’t a thought until high school, why not just say, “I wanna be Superman. I wanna save people while flying and X-ray vision really sounds cool.”
I’ll tell you why. Because when we would have arrived home, my parents would talk about me in their bedroom loud enough for the whole family to hear.
“Does he know Superman isn’t real?”, my mother would ask.
“How should I know?”, my father would respond.
“Well, you should spend more time with him. He needs to learn the reality from fiction.”
“Isn’t that what school is for? What the hell are they teaching in that school, anyway?”
“Maybe if you helped him with his homework, you would know.”
“I work all day. Your job is to work with them.”
“I have a life too. By the time I cook dinner and clean the house, I’m exhausted.”
And that was life when I was a kid. I always had the feeling as the youngest of three, my parents would go to sleep praying that we would be adults when they awoke the next day and they would not have to concern themselves with trying to raise us.
And just where are we?
But now that I’m well past my prime, I wonder what I have in common with the child in that picture.
I know it was me, but it feels like a lifetime ago. I smile when I look but while I had no plan, and my parents had no plan for me,
the best I can come up with is it wasn’t terrible.
I remember my brother teaching me to ride a bicycle. My father taught my brother and my sister. It was enough. I mean, I was seven years old and I guess my brother figured that the other kids would make fun of me if they learned I could not ride.
It took ten minutes. I fell twice and the third time there was more shaking on my dad’s old bike than the night my brother made me watch Frankenstein on Creature Feature in the dark. But the fourth time… that fourth time. No shaking. I rode back to the house and crashed into the garage door because he did not show me how to stop. My brother helped me up, and told me to wait, while he rode his bike out of the garage.
We rode to Ogden elementary school, and he showed me how to brake, explaining that our next move was back to the house and telling our dad it was time for a trip to the bike store.
It was a Schwinn Sting-Ray. Yellow with a small tire in the front and a big tire in the rear. And ooh, it had a banana seat. I rode that bike for the next three years.
Most Saturdays I found out who was going where and joined in. Football, basketball, softball, hockey. I left after lunch and returned when the streetlights came on.
My dad bought me my next bike when I was fourteen years old because I had outgrown the other one. Still no plan, I rode this bigger bike until I was seventeen. Hello, Driver’s Ed.
By the time I was eighteen, the lightbulb clicked. I had the answer. Journalism. It made sense and while I was not terribly coordinated with my pronouns and complete sentences, I showed a passion. For the first time in my left. But this is my life and after an acceptance letter arrived from Boston University’s school of journalism, I was shipped off to North Carolina State University to study textiles. I was heading to the family business. I somehow managed a passing grade in chemistry in high school and my life’s work was now going to be something I cared nothing about. Maybe I should have taken the question more seriously when I was seven and answered, “Anything but a textile engineer.”
Now what?
In two years, I believe I passed two classes and begged my mother to come home. She agreed but I had to declare a major and find a college. Now I needed a plan. When nothing came to mind, business seemed to work.
After a rather hectic and confusing college career, my parents bought me a nice cordovan leather briefcase and four suits. I saw other men in suits carrying their briefcases, so I felt good. I never wanted to stand out. I just wanted to fit in. I just wanted to be one of the minions commuting into New York City every day. I just wanted to do what everybody else was doing.
I landed a job in New York City, moved to Boca Raton, got married, had two terrific sons, and nineteen years later divorced my wife.
I reconnected with some people from elementary school on social media. It astonishes me how I am speaking with people I have had no communication with for forty years. I asked some if they had a plan at eight years old and to my astonishment two of them said they did. Their parents set them up with plans to be doctors.
Both of their dads were physicians, and they knew that they should start thinking about it early in life.
The first married, with grandchildren, is looking forward to retiring shortly. He has been teaching the grandkids to sail on the three-hundred-foot sailboat.
The other, divorced, living on the water in Hawaii, has three children and two grandchildren. He said he never wanted to go into medicine, “But it turned out to be a good career. I just wish I would have had more free time as a kid.”
And that’s it. My childhood was good. We took a few family vacations, went to see some ball games, and never thought about the future. I now look back and wonder.