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NaBloPoMo – Day 4

Day 4

When you were a kid, did you want to have the same job or a different job than your parents when you grew up?

Vastly different.

I remember my mother always doing something in an office.  That thing involved her having a desk and a typewriter.  It seemed like everybody at her job knew and liked her well.  But no part of what she did interested me.  She worked at a TV station and the only job I would have wanted there belonged to the weather man.  That, I liked.  Her job seemed boring.

Her next job, she probably did roughly the same thing as she had a desk and a typewriter.  She worked at a radio station this time, however, and what the DJ’s were up to seemed far more interesting than what she was doing.

In my earliest recollection, my dad ran a bar, which I didn’t really understand when I was a kid.  I knew people went to this bar and drank beer, but I never knew or cared to find out why or anything else.  I never much paid attention to the bar beyond that.  No interest.  (I think I’ve only been in bars a handful of times since he stopped working there; the longest amount of time I’ve spent in one, I was an extra in a movie).

After that, my father worked in various roles managing plant and other operations at food processors.  Yeah, sounds exciting.  He liked it.  He became an executive before he retired.  I would have jumped from the roof of one of the buildings.

My parents were highly concerned with my education.  But if they thought they might be pushing me towards some upper management position with a corner office overlooking the Harbor, golf outings at Hunt Valley, and three martini lunches at Haussner’s, that’s not the kid they were raising.  The kid they were raising wanted to read and learn things and question things and be creative.  And active.  Play baseball.  I would have been happier on a ball field or in a meteorology lab or writing poetry at some college campus full of old buildings and lakes.  Or writing maps.  In another life, I’m an urban and transportation planner.

If anything, my parents eventually followed what nearly everybody else was trying to do those days — going and getting a government or corporate job.  I questioned that.  I wanted something different.  Just the way they raised me.