Eyes Wide Open, Always Dreaming

My four-year-old has it all figured out. When he grows up, he wants to be a cake maker. And play baseball for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

I ask Brady if he prefers one career path over the other. He insists he can do both equally, that he can play baseball during the summer and make cakes during the winter as well as on days the games are cancelled because of rain – or more specifically as he says, “when the whitening detector goes off at the fields and we have to get back in the truck and go home.”

This tells me three things. 1) Brady watches too many cake competitions on The Food Network with his mom. 2) He just might be spending too much time with his older sister at the softball fields. 3) The kid’s got more direction at four then I’ve ever had at any one point in my life.

When I was his age I wanted to be a superhero. More specifically, I wanted to be Superman - so much so that my desire lent itself to becoming one of those stories my mom tells over, and over, and over again. Some cultures refer to stories like these as “lore.”

My mom has two of these non-fictitious tales of lore. You only get one. For now.

When I was five, Underoos were fairly new and gaining tremendous popularity. For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, Underoos are children’s underwear depicting comic book characters, cartoon characters, and even video game characters. Underoos give kids a whole new dimension to “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.”

The great thing about Underoos, even now, is that they can be worn as either underwear or outfits all on their own…provided you’re staying home. It’s here I note that Underoos should never be worn on the outside of one’s regular clothes in public, especially when attempting to fly to kindergarten.

My mom had a tendency to let me do really stupid things as kid, not because she didn’t care, but because she wanted to make sure she captured it on film. Since she was a big advocate of accumulating blackmail evidence (which ironically she cannot locate thirty years later…), she let me walk right out the front door and up the street to Eugene Ware Elementary School.

I don’t even want to think about how my life would have turned out had I actually made it to school dressed like that, but at the time it seemed like the most rational thing a boy my age could do. All I knew was that we lived in Small Town, Kansas. There were Superman clothes in my dresser drawers. And I too had (and still do have, actually) the few strands of hair that curled against my forehead just as my hero’s did. There was no logical reason not to believe that I did not have super powers enhanced by the sun.

As a kid I was always dreaming with my eyes open. I used to think that I was the Incredible Hulk - constantly ripping the buttons off my shirts before trying to lift the refrigerator. I believed that any automobile I got into had the potential to jump over creeks like the General Lee. I wanted an alien for my very own that I could put in a basket on the handlebars of my bike and pedal off into the forest and eventually fly into the night sky. I wanted to move from New Jersey to Reseda, California and learn karate from our apartment maintenance man, to be a fighter pilot who got to invert over MiGs only to flip them the bird, to be a Ferrari driving detective, and to discover lost pirate treasure with my very own band of misfits. To this day I still dream of owning a time machine.

Looking back at all of that I can’t help but think that maybe I enjoy writing so much because I’m a dreamer. Perhaps it’s because writing allows me to live the lives of so many different characters, not because their lives are better than mine but because their lives are ones that for better or worse I’d wouldn’t know how to live in the real world. Mostly though I think it’s because I don’t know how to turn my imagination off.

That’s what I want for my kids, to never feel like they have to turn their imaginations off. I want them to imagine greatly. Not to think bigger, but to think brighter, or differently. To not think confined by limits, but to think limitless. I want for them what they want for themselves. If that’s being the best cake making ballplayer to ever put on a Los Angeles Dodgers uniform so be it. I like cake and baseball. And superheroes. And time machines.

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