When I was a kid, my parents used to tease me. (Yeah. It happens.) Normal boys, they would tell me, want to be something when they grow up. You’re supposed to pass through these stages of different kinds of labels where you want to be a fireman, or a policeman. And then you grow up a little and you want to be a pro football player, or an astronaut. And then you grow up a little more, and you want to be a doctor, a lawyer, or a scientist. And then the sorrows and cares of this life rise up and choke the life out of you; you discover that you’re actually pretty good at numbers, and you settle down and become an accountant. Little boys are supposed to be always looking for these pre-packaged niches they can slide into and feel normal and successful at the same time.
And then I’d think to myself, or sometimes I’d say, Yeah, but normal little boys are perfectly content to play with Hot-wheels cars and G.I. Joes. I couldn’t play with toy cars when I was a kid, not really. It was too mundane for me. Yes. Cars. That’s how most people get around in this part of the world. You can go left, or right, or straight forward. If you’re feeling really tricky, you can go backward. We’ve covered that. Nothing new or imaginative here. Let’s move along! What I really liked, though, were those really nifty-cool cars that had doors you could pop open, because then I could pretend that this car had special doors that could fold out into wings, and then they could fly. Now that’s something worth thinking about. Cars that fly. You don’t see that every day. At least most people don’t. I do.
So my mom or my dad would say, “Kyle, what do you want to be when you grow up?” And I’d say, “I don’t know. What I’d really like is this job where I think up these really great ideas and then people get together and make them work. I’d be, you know, an ideas man.” And then my dad or my mom would chuckle (actually, I think it was my dad) and they’d say, “Well, I don’t think they make jobs like that.” And then I’d sort of mentally shrug my shoulders and go back to playing with my flying cars or reading my favorite fairy tales. And that was that. No ambition, really.
Well, sort of. I really did want to be an ideas man. I get these really great schemes.
When I was in, maybe kindergarten or first grade, my house was just across the street from my school. It was a grade school with this HUGE playground, because it used to be the town high school. The town built a new, nicer high school, and turned the old one into a grade school. They took the football stadium, stuck a couple of monkey bars in one end and called it a playground. 100 yards of playground, I guess back in the day they had money, because the wall around our playground was made up of solid red sandstone, about four feet high, all the way around. On one side, though, the wall went up to eight or ten feet, or maybe even higher, because it seamlessly turned into stadium bleachers. There was a low wall sticking out at the bottom, about three feet, and then every foot, foot and a half, it would go up and back, like a series of gigantic steps, all made of red sandstone, topped with cement. It was gorgeous.
It was also old. Old sandstone crumbles. I remember grabbing a friend and pulling him over to the bleachers and taking a stick (or maybe it was just my finger) and scraping along the stones, around the edge of the mortar. The stuff crumbled into powder in my hands. Yep, said my friend, and that red dirt? It’s only found in Oklahoma.
Well, I knew enough about economics, even at the age of six, to know what that means. If it’s rare, it’ll sell. Within days I had an operation going. We were going to harvest some of that red dirt, haul it across state lines, and sell it at exorbitant prices. We’d be the richest first graders in the world. I even had a giant 50 gallon bag (formerly for dog food) to carry it in. I don’t remember exactly what happened to our venture. I probably couldn’t get enough man power together to get anywhere with it. But anyway it fell through. Years later, having moved away from Oklahoma, I have to confess to my embarrassment that red dirt can be found almost anywhere, though perhaps not so often and not so bright. It also doesn’t seem to be much use to anybody.
When I was 13, I was on a swimming team, first though my local YMCA, and then through my high school. It was a different town—my family moved a lot. However, there seemed to be a vast shortage of Olympic sized swimming pools to practice in. The Y had one, and the Goodyear plant had one, but most pools in town were for recreational swimming, not for swimming laps. The only really good pools were to found on the neighboring army base. They had about 4 of them, all 100 meters long. Beautiful swimming pools—that couldn’t be used without a direct military connection. I saw a scarcity, and I jumped on it. I broke the news to my mom: I was going to build a series of Olympic-size swimming pools all across town. By virtue of their superior size and quality, all the teens would come to my pools and everybody would be rich. My mom’s only response was that I’d better wait to see if we were even still here in a few months. In two months we moved.
Understand, these weren’t “what do you want to do with your life” ideas. They were just schemes. Little schemes. The summer before my senior year in high school, I calmly stepped into my parents’ bedroom one night and explained to them my plan to drop out of school, get my GED, and open a new Christian bookstore to pay my way through college. I was completely bewildered that they insisted I complete my schooling. None of these ideas had the ring to me of “I want to be a…” They were projects I wanted to do not be.
Somehow MorningStar changed all that. I’m 19 and suddenly I decide I want to move across the country and attend a school that gives no solid guarantee of exactly how they are going to benefit you. For some reason my parents decided they no longer had the right or need to be my calm voice of reason. So I come lolloping over the mountains, thinking I’ve got the world in my pocket, ready for who knows what. I know I didn’t know what.
And the first thing that I really learned at MorningStar is that I am unimpressive. I just don’t have the star power. I mean, I’m a good talker, when I’ve got something to say, but I stink at jumping on somebody else’s bandwagon. I’m a relatively good writer, but that’s a mediocre skill in a land where hardly anybody really reads. There were a lot of other people there who were a lot more frighteningly beautiful than me, and every one of them was trying to lead somebody somewhere. I had a lot of places I wanted to go as well, but every one of my schemes required some preparation, and a lot of followers, and there weren’t followers left. Or if there were, they didn’t really have the time to sit through any proper preparation. So I decided to be a follower. And I discovered that I’m a terrible follower. Everybody was going the wrong direction.
Then somewhere, in the midst of all that, somebody had the audacity to imply strongly that there was something that I couldn’t do. It wasn’t even at my church. It was my then friend’s dad. I announced one day at his house that I was tired of living off my six dollars an hour at the grocery store, and that I was going to get me a job in a skyscraper, making $10 an hour. He kind of looked at me, rolled his eyes a little, and made a sort of hmph-ing sound. The ever classic snort of derision. And something inside me snapped. If there’s one thing that can get my goat, it’s even the slightest implication that I can’t. I can do anything I set myself to, and don’t you forget it. Within a month, I had a job in a skyscraper, making $10 an hour. I also had no friend, but that’s a different story and will be told at a different time.
Since then I’ve been saving up my schemes, and I have determined in my heart that I will not let one of them fall to the ground. Which is why I pray, Dear Lord, let me live to be 300. I’m going to need every minute of that time.
What am I going to be? I’m going to be me—and I’m going to fly.
neumatikos 