The day my
six-year old daughter told me she wanted to drive an ice cream truck, I put a
lock on the basement door. It occurred
to me that if the children couldn’t enter the basement, they couldn’t live in
it as adults either. I love ice
cream-don’t get me wrong, but I’m also an eternal pragmatist. You can’t eat it every day and fit into your
pants. More importantly, you can’t drive
it all over creation with gas at almost four bucks a gallon and pay your bills.
But to a six-year old, driving an ice cream truck is whip cream, extra nuts,
cherry on top kind of success. There are no obstacles too big, no fears too
paralyzing, no bills in the mailbox to prevent them from running straight to
the recycling bin in search of boxes from Costco from which they begin to build
their empire. A few rolls of Scotch tape
and several dried out markers later, they’re in business.
If
loving what you do was that easy. We’ve
all heard the stories about the corporate executives that gave it all up to
open a Pet Pedicure Parlor and have never been happier. That’s fantastic, but something tells me they
have a bit saved up for when it stops raining cats and dogs. When did I get so cynical? When did I stop believing in the ice cream truck? What was it that I wanted to be when I grew
up?
Somewhere between our first mortgage payment
and insuring a male teenager on a vehicle, I realized that what we love to do
is more often replaced by what we have to do.
I’ve only known a few people who knew what they wanted to do shortly
after the embryonic stage, stayed the course, made all the right decisions, and
landed where they intended. Speaking for
the rest of us, we labor over Myers Briggs tests and online surveys, we pay
career coaches and life coaches and take coach buses to seminars trying to find
our colors or parachutes or both. And if
you’re really lucky, you’ll find something that you love and that pays the
bills. That is cherry on the top kind of
success. And it looks different for
everybody.
Recently, I’ve
been faced with deciding my major, once and for all. In other words, is it going to be an ice
cream truck driver or a pet pamperer? Finishing
college when you are …well, long after you are supposed to…is a second
chance. This time around, cynicism works
in my favor. I’m old enough to know what
I’m good at, young enough to try something new, smart enough to know that the
money will come, but wise enough to know it doesn’t really matter.
I want to
write. I want to be Erma Bombeck when I
grow up. I’ll know I’ve arrived when I
can write something that people other than my mother want to read. Until then, may we all believe in the power
of the ice cream truck! May you still hear the tinkling of the bells,
run out the front door, and place your order with utter abandon! Driver, make mine a double…scoop!
