What did I want to be at five? Well, do you mean chronological age or emotional age? After all, I’m chronologically in my seventies, but emotionally, I’m only twenty. That was only fifteen or so years ago. Something out of the Playboy Philosophy? I mean, I was only a kid!
I was never well-coordinated, so being a dancer was missing from my list. The lack of horses in my section of New York City prevented me from becoming a cowboy. This is the part of the post where I could falsify things to make myself look good. More mature than I was, intellectually advanced, and so on.
I wanted to be a doctor.
Don’t believe me, do you? Well, it’s true. Between five and around eleven, I was eager to get a medical degree. How did this happen? My sister. She was in a nursing bachelor’s degree program, and I was the recipient of all her cast-off textbooks on things like bacteriology, anatomy, and physiology.
My father was the super for the building where we lived and worked widely throughout the city for his employer. Free basement use came with the job; soon, a small storage room became my lab. When my sister dissected a fetal pig in anatomy, I shadowed the dissection in my lab with a fetal pig from a slaughterhouse ( courtesy of a friend of my father). I learned to prepare, plate, and read cultures from the bacteriology text. When a laboratory at a university closed and discarded equipment, my father scavenged a microscope, lab glassware, and other materials for my basement lab.
Eventually, my interests shifted to other things, like guitars and girls, but the things I learned from the texts stayed with me.
If we fast-forward some years, I am working in an operating room, passing instruments and holding retractors. A few years beyond that, I am mapping out the foramina and physical landmarks on a sphenoid bone—despite studying to be a cultural anthropologist, the osteology lab was fun.
So sometimes, the things you want at five become touchstones for places you go in life.
Pay more attention to what your five-year-old wants to be.
I wanted to be an artist. 😀
And you are!
😊 Lucky there’s no rush for these things.