go.Jimmy.go

I remember a song we used to sing in kindergarten at Porter Elementary School in 1975.

I was in the afternoon class, and every so often Mrs. Rapp would gather a gaggle of us five-year-olds around this lime-green, slightly out-of-tune upright piano. We’d just finished our vanilla wafer cookies and half-pint cartons of milk and were settling comfortably into our afternoon sugar comas when she’d start singing a little song that went something like this:

♫ What do you want to be when you grow up?
What do you want to beeeeeeeee? ♫

Then she’d go around the room and ask each of us what we wanted to be.

I hated that part.

At five years old, “grown up” seemed roughly as far away as the year 2026. I had no idea what I wanted to be. Worse, I could feel my turn getting closer.

Fireman.

Doctor.

Astronaut.

The answers traveled around the room, and I remember desperately trying to come up with something original. I didn’t want to copy somebody else. I wanted something cool. Something nobody had thought of yet.

When my turn finally came, I panicked.

“Fireman!” I blurted out.

To this day, I have no idea why. I suspect the big red truck had something to do with it.

What Did I Want to Be?

One of the earliest things I remember truly wanting to be was Spider-Man.

Not someone like Spider-Man.

Spider-Man.

I wasn’t particularly thrilled about the bite from a radioactive-spider portion of the career path, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices for your dreams.

My brother can back me up on this. He caught me more than once climbing the walls in my sleep, apparently convinced that I was the famous wall-crawler. And on warm summer mornings after a rainstorm, I’d walk past spiderwebs shimmering in the sunlight around our front porch and think:

Someday.

I think the whole superhero thing appealed to me because I was a pretty introverted kid. I understood Peter Parker. There was something fascinating about being the quiet guy nobody paid much attention to, then putting on a mask and becoming someone larger than life.

Someone confident and someone people admired. That’s who I wanted to be. At least for a while.

Over the ensuing years, the answer to Mrs. Rapp’s question changed more times than I can count.

I wanted to be a fireman. A doctor. A rock star. An electrician. An actor. And eventually, somehow, I wound up working in Information Technology—a career choice that probably would have caused Mrs. Rapp to immediately stop playing the piano and ask five-year-old me to explain exactly what that meant.

The funny thing is, in one form or another, I’ve managed to become quite a few of those things:

I’ve been a fireman—if extinguishing the Great Pierogie Fire of 1990. I assumed the role of doctor whenever my daughter was sick or came running to me with a scraped knee.

I’ve been a rock star, although admittedly on a slightly smaller scale than the one I envisioned while pretending my grandmother’s tomato slicer was a guitar.

I’ve changed enough light fixtures and tackled enough household projects to occasionally convince myself that I was a maintenance man.

And I’ve certainly done my share of acting—particularly during those moments at work when someone has locked themselves out of their computer for the umpteenth time and I summon my award-winning portrayal of Jim, The Patient and Cheerful IT Guy.

Sadly, Spider-Man never happened. It’s probably for the best. I’m not sure my knees could handle swinging between buildings these days.

But something else happened that five-year-old kid sitting beside Mrs. Rapp’s lime-green piano never would have imagined: I became a writer.

The One I Didn’t See Coming

For years, “writer” was another entry on my list of things I wanted to be someday.

At eleven years old, I wrote a letter to a fictional vampire that was published in Dynamite magazine. I later managed to write and get a letter printed in the editorial section of a Conan the Barbarian comic book. At the time, seeing my own words in print felt like I’d cracked open the door to some secret world. I just didn’t know where that door would eventually lead.

In 2011 it led to blogging, then journalism. Then interviews with musicians, actors and entertainers I once could only have imagined talking to. It led to writing for magazines, newspapers and websites. Eventually, it led to books. Six of them now.

There’s something wonderfully strange about holding a book you wrote and thinking about that five-year-old boy sitting on the floor at Porter Elementary School, worried because he couldn’t figure out what he wanted to be when he grew up.

I wonder what he’d think if I could sit beside him for a minute. I’d probably tell him not to worry so much about his answer. Because that’s the part Mrs. Rapp’s little song left out. You don’t have to pick just one thing.

I’m Still Not Sure I’ve Grown Up

When we’re kids, adults make growing up sound like a destination:

“Someday you’ll grow up.”

“Someday you’ll know what you want to do.”

“Someday you’ll become whatever it is you’re supposed to become.”

Then someday arrives and you discover something nobody bothered to mention:

You’re still becoming.

There are still things I want to write. Places I want to see. People I want to meet. Songs I want to play. Stories I want to tell. There are things I haven’t even discovered yet that someday might become important parts of who I am. Maybe that’s the sort of thing that makes life interesting.

So if I could somehow travel back to Porter Elementary School and Mrs. Rapp gathered us around that lime-green, out-of-tune piano one more time, eventually she’d get to me.

♫ What do you want to be when you grow up? ♫

This time, I wouldn’t say fireman.

I wouldn’t say Spider-Man.

I wouldn’t even say writer.

I’d probably smile and give her the only answer that makes sense after all these years:

I’m still figuring it out.

And I hope I always am.