Dreams Change

Do you ever find that you do most of your retrospective thinking at a certain time? Mine is when it's raining and I'm watching the night fly by out the car window. Okay, this could have been a one-time dramatic moment but I must confide in you, dear reader that in retrospect of my retrospection I was feeling quite deep.

I started thinking about the things that I want. Selfishly I pushed past the years that are soon to come of job-hunting, degree-chasing and marriage-making and started to think about what will really matter to me in, let's say five or ten years.

But before I divulge my five to ten year dreams, it would be best to explain why they are worth writing about.

As a child I thought everything about my life could be a movie. When my mother would turn of my favorite '90s show (there were so many) when it was only half-way through and tell me to clean up the giant dog droppings in our back yard, I would lean my head against the cement wall of our carport--in one hand the little blue shovel and in the other a crap-encrusted milk gallon cut in half--and I would imagine being an orphan forced to do labor and to have only buttered bread and water to look forward to for dinner. (for some reason that was the worst thing I could come up with) I wanted to act and sing and star in feature films that would obviously revolve around me and my dramatic life. I wanted to marry someone famous and hire someone else to clean up my dog's droppings. I can't remember the day I lost those dreams. But one by one I laughed them off.

So when things seem tough I tell myself to think about what will matter in five or ten years. In five years, I'll be wanting a baby, to plan our dream home with lots of land, family that live no further than a day's drive, a job where I can write or read or do whatever it is God wants me to do with all these words in my head, with all these dreams and facts and everything I've learned. I thank God that one day I can pour my life into my children, and not into myself. I'll show them why Yogi Bear and Bugs Bunny are hands-down the best cartoons to walk the television screen, why peanut butter makes absolutely anything edible and why even if they want to pretend to be abandoned orphans with no food to live on, they will still have to pick up after that dog they begged for.

I will play the guitar for them and hope they're more like Kyle than like me--workers with patience who like to go to bed early. And I'll try to always understand them. But if they choose to be litte drama-machines with a daydream fantasy always up their sleeve, chocolate perpetually on their face and fingers and a temper set off by as little as a breeze, then I will understand them all the more, because they'll be just like me.