Now that I as going to go to school in England, I would be more and more under her wing. In fact, I had barely landed when she took me on one of those shopping expeditions in Oxford Street that was the immediate prelude to Ripley Court--a school in Surrey which was now in the hands of her sister-in-law, Mrs. Pearce, the wife of Uncle Ben's late brother, Robert. He had been killed in a cycling accident when, coming to the bottom of a hill, he had failed to turn the corner and had run straight into a brick wall. His brakes had gone back on him halfway down.
It was on one of those mornings in Oxford Street, perhaps not the very first one, that Aunt Maud and I had a great conversation about my future. We had just bought me several pairs of grey flannel trousers and a sweater and some shoes and some grey flannel shirts and one of those floppy flannel hats that English children have to wear, and now, having emerged from D. H Evans, were riding down Oxford Street on the top of an open bus, right up in the front, where one could see simply everything
"I wonder if Tom has thought at all about his future," Aunt Maud said and looked at me, winking and blinking with both eyes as a sign of encouragement. I was Tom. She sometimes addressed you in the third person, like that, perhaps as a sign of some delicate, inward diffidence about bringing the matter up at all.
I admitted that I had though a little about the future, and what I wanted to be. But I rather hesitated to tell her that I wanted to be a novelist.
"Do you think writing would be a good profession for anyone?" I said tentatively.
"Yes indeed, writing is a very fine profession! But what kind of writing would you like to do?"
"I have been thinking that I might write stories," I said.
"I imagine you would probably do quite well at that, some day," said Aunt Maud, kindly, but added: "Of course, you know that writers sometimes find it very difficult to make their way in the world."
"Yes, I realize that," I said reflectively.
"Perhaps if you had some other occupation, as a means of making a living, you might find time to write in your spare moments. Novelists sometimes get their start that way, you know."
"I might be a journalist," I suggested, "and write for the newspapers."
"Perhaps that is a good idea," she said. "A knowledge of languages would be very valuable in that field, too. You could work your way up to the position of foreign correspondent."
"And I could write books in my spare time."
"Yes, I suppose you probably could manage it that way."
I think we rode all the way out to Ealing, talking in this somewhat abstract and utopian strain, and finally we got off, and crossed Haven Green to Castlebar Road where we had to stop in at Durston House for something or other.
It's a simple enough conversation. An adult asking a child what s/he wants to be when s/he grows up. Everyone reading this post probably had similar conversations with a parent or teacher or counselor or priest or minister or whomever. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" asks the visiting police officer. "A police officer!" says I. "What do you want to be when you grow up, my son?" says my parish priest. "A priest!" says I. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" says my mother. "A writer?" says I timidly. My mother clucks her tongue, "Well, you can take English classes, but how about computers? There's a future in that." Thus I began my college career, on a full-ride scholarship, as a Computer Science major.
That didn't quite work out the way my mother imagined. Do I regret the twists and turns my life took on the way to my current situation? I suppose I would make different choices given the opportunity. Maybe finish my PhD in literature. Maybe hole up in a bedroom of the first apartment my wife and I had, banging away on a computer, writing my first novel. Maybe forgo college entirely and travel, visiting the places I've always dreamed of seeing and now probably never will. Rome. London. Paris. Florence. Beijing.
A side effect of this pandemic, for me, is all the time I have now to think about things like this. My future, at the moment, is pretty hemmed in by financial and parental obligations. I have bills to figure out how to pay and a family to support on a greatly reduced income. I won't be planning trips to Greece or Madrid or even Green Bay any time soon. Instead, I will hammer away on some blog post for an hour or so, publish it, and then move on to grading and making a spinach artichoke bomb. The blogging keeps my dream alive, and the bomb feeds my kids and wife. Some things don't change.
So, go ahead. Ask me what I want to be when I grow up.
Saint Marty's answer will probably still be, "A writer."
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