I Want To Be A Columnist

I spent most the day writing yesterday but none of it suitable (whatever that means) for a blog.  So, in order not to miss a day, which seems to be important to me, here's a little something from November 2008.

    I want to be a columnist when I grow up.  Fame and fortune would be nice, too, but I’d settle for people reading what I write as long as someone pays the bills.

    When I was a child, I wanted to grow up to be just like Mom.  My goals were specific and definable:  go to Oberlin College, have four children (two girls and then two boys), be a teacher, and smoke cigarettes.  It didn’t quite work out that way.  I went to Grinnell College, had two children (one girl and one boy), became a teacher, and never took up smoking.

    In college, when I was searching for what I wanted to do when I grew up, I took a career inventory test.  That was back in the day when such tests had both male and female scores.  (I have no idea how a test can be gendered.)  My top two scores concerned the career counselor a bit:  Catholic priest and male English professor. 

    With my usual completely unrealistic aplomb, I immediately set out in another direction.  I wanted to be a gerontologist, and I majored in German.  That choice did afford me a spring semester in Germany my junior year in college, and I did work with the elderly as a VISTA Volunteer my first year out of college.  But from there my dreams took a detour.  Instead of going back to school to get an M.S. I got married for my MRS.

    Once I was pregnant, my goal was to be a stay-at-home mom, and that worked for about five years.  Then financial reality set in, and I went back to school.  (Somehow my B.A. in German—no teaching degree included—did not market well.)  I wanted to study German again to teach the language, but the university I chose for its relatively traffic-free commute did not offer an M.A. in German.  Thus, using my excellent reasoning ability, I chose the M.A. in English so I could teach at the community college level.  After all, I loved to read and write, and by then I wanted to teach adults, not children.

    So, I got to be an English teacher for nineteen years, an ill-paying but otherwise perfect job for a single parent.  And I enjoyed most years of it—except for the five or six years I wanted to become a Protestant version of a priest.  Female, that is.

    And now, having retired early with no immediate retirement benefits in a world where the stock market swings resemble bungee jumping, I have decided that I want to be a columnist.  From what I read, I could become a niche columnist, which is a nice way to say a columnist who doesn’t fit any of the regular columnist categories.  The problem is that I have a hard time defining my niche.  It has something to do with Whidbey Island and cougars and Alzheimers and fibromyalgia with a little bit of former English teacher, former Mormon, former single parent, former this-and-that-and-everything thrown in for good measure.  (My life experience reads like skewed fiction.)

    I guess there is a lot to be learned from my various career dreams, but what it is I don’t exactly know.  Maybe my desire to be a columnist is proof that I’ve not yet grown up.  Maybe I could become another Erma Bombeck, as my brother suggests.  Just don’t call me Dave (Barry, that is).