Childhood Dreams (LynnK)

For donkey’s years, I’ve been on an e-mail loop with about a hundred women, nearly all of them writers. Their conversation (and support and friendship) is above the price of rubies. I treasure each and every one of them. And on occasion, someone poses a question that helps us know one another in a whole new way.

Just lately, in relation to a story about a young family man choosing how to live in the face of terminal cancer, we were asked about our own childhood dreams. What did we want to be when we grew up? What did we want to do before we died? Kind of like the “Bucket List,” viewed through young, healthy, ambitious eyes.

I’m among those who failed to answer the question. After consideration, I realized that with one exception—to be described in a future post—Lynn-child had few aspirations regarding the future. Unlike most of my buddies, I never even considered being a writer. But like many of them, I entertained hopes of dancing Swan Lake (which would require pudgy ballerinas to become all the rage) and breeding horses (although I had no idea how that was done). I wanted to win an Oscar.

Mostly, though, I was preoccupied with intricate and utterly fantastical fantasies, some of which played out over a period of years. That’s probably because my family was always on the move. By the time I reached 7th grade, I’d attended eight different schools (Navy Brat!) and had learned by necessity to entertain myself.

In early days, bored with playacting Cinderella and the other mostly helpless fairytale females, I turned my eyes to the stars. A radio show (we were the last family in the northern hemisphere to get a TV) caught my imagination and shot me off into outer space.

I still remember the voice-over lines that introduced the show: High adventure in the wild, vast reaches of space! Missions of daring in the name of interplanetary justice! Travel into the future with Buzz Corey, Commander-in-Chief of the Space Patrol!

I quickly changed the the hero's name to Roy Starr. My first pseudonym. “Buzz” just didn’t suit me. I also designed a classy black-and-silver uniform for myself, created a cast of supporting characters (after killing off the TV show’s nitwit sidekick, “Cadet Happy,” in my first adventure) and spent many hundreds of hours saving assorted planets from doom.

Absolutely no one knew about my secret missions. I made friends, went to school, rode my bike, became a Brownie, and secretly blasted bad guys with my ray gun. Hey. Girls just wanna have fun.

About the same time, probably influenced by historical swashbuckler movies and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (I watched it on a neighbor’s TeeVee), I became obsessed with swords, capes, and medieval-style pageantry. I decided to run another story on a parallel mental track, and in this one, I was a young, handsome, brave, reluctant king.

No, I never did want to be a man in real life. But when I was a kid, guys had all the adventures. Well, nearly all. I read—and honor—the adventures of Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and even the nurse stories about Cherry Ames. I have never wished to change gender. I just thought opportunities should be open to every human being. I still believe that.

Of course, even if full equality came to pass, I’d continue to live most of my dreams in my imagination. In real life, I’m not royal or brave or remotely talented in any practical way. Turns out that I was destined to be a writer after all, even from my kindergarten days. Well, make that a storyteller. I’ve always been a storyteller. Even a story-liver. But writing the stories is damn hard work, harder even than saving my kingdom or the universe.


Nonetheless, all these years later, my imagination still teems with characters and roils with adventures. There’s a book in there right now. I am finding it and writing it. And in a way I cannot explain, I am living it.

Just the way I did in the story-dreams of my childhood.

So . . . what were your childhood dreams?