Okay…at age five, I wanted to be Hopalong Cassidy when I grew up. Santa even brought me the Hoppy outfit — black shirt and pants, black hat, and a six-shooter! Truly a goal worthy of pursuit, right?! Alas, fickle me! By age eight, I had already abandoned that dream and went on to aspire to be Roy Rogers (no Dale Evans skirt stuff for me).
Somewhere over the next few years, I lost track of those lofty dreams. I wanted to be a teacher, an artist, a nothing-in-particular…but never a nurse like my mom. Looking in her medical books at a drawing of a cross-section of a human being would send me screaming in horror. And blood — nope! Wasn’t going near that stuff!
Somehow as I neared adolescence, I decided that I wanted to be Brigitte Bardot. Sadly, that did not happen. (I still want to be Brigitte Bardot, but hey! That ship went the way of the Titanic long ago.)
In high school, I had a brief infatuation with Lawrence of Arabia and especially with camels. I wanted a camel to ride. Seriously. (It replaced another brief dream of riding a tractor in the city.) I even learned to make a camel face and to vocalize like a camel. (I drew the line at spitting.) The camel impersonations went on for quite a few years, mostly as a source of entertainment for my kiddo and his friends. Note: my husband has never seen this portrayal, much as he might have wheedled. Part of the dream came true many years later when I got to ride a Bactrian camel, Wookie, three different times at the zoo. Let me assure you….camels do not do their job happily or willingly. Wookie had a cute (hah!) way of stepping away from the platform just as I would put my leg over his back. So…one foot between Wookie’s humps, one foot hopping on the platform, the rest of me straddling the air in between. Fun, huh?! And Wookie managed to sway his body from side to side while being ridden, gaining momentum, with the rather obvious hope of pitching me off. I guess that’s what happens when a camel that usually totes children has to tolerate an adult. A, shall we say, less than tiny adult. Okay, a fairly heavy adult. Even if camels are pack animals designed to carry heavy loads, it doesn’t mean they want to. (Actually, Uncle Neal, whose family had fostered me while my mom was hospitalized, had been a missionary in Egypt for forty years, and he had warned me that camels were unpleasant creatures. He also said that doctors in Egypt treated more cases of camel bites than any other ailment. So I should have known….)
In between wanting my own camel and becoming all the people I have been during my adult years (student, mom, advertising worker, poet, quasi-hippie, motorcycle mama, pit mom, social worker, school psychologist, supervisor, theatre person, speech/debate judge and coach, instructor, writer, grandma, GGma, and who knows what all else), I spent a bit of time wanting to be Holly Golightly. There was an air of sophistication involved with that one that I never really achieved, but it was fun dreaming. (Actually, there was a brief beatnik period in there, too.)
I often think I’ve led a rather quiet, boring life. But maybe not…..
You allegedly only live once, so why not concurrently live as many lives as possible during that once?