In all the years it took to grow
up, no one ever told me, “I want to be a writer.” Boys
yammered about firemen, doctors, and hardware sales. So did the
girls. It was an enlightened childhood for me, where gals could do
anything the guys could do, but journalism apparently appealed to no
one.
What we
aspire to be depends far less on gender and more on ability, tenacity
and the luck of the draw. Good looks don’t hurt, either, not that
I would know. I planned to attend veterinary school.
Whatever it says about my personal peculiarities, I have always felt
most at home among animals.
Plans change. One visit to the
hog farm at Mississippi State University’s School of Veterinary Medicine
had me realizing that standing knee-deep in pig poop while artificially
inseminating a 1,000-pound sow somehow lacked the lab-coated glamour I
had envisioned. Believe me, you do not want to know what it takes to
get a female pig the size of a SUV in the mood. And if you already
know, I hope you are speaking from your experience in animal husbandry,
nothing more.
I turned my attention to medical
school. I secured a degree in biological sciences and pursued hands-on
experience as a veterinary technician. You’d be surprised how many
parallels to human medicine there are in the animal field, especially
when it comes to the males of any species.
Yet, there was one serious
problem. I cannot abide sick people. They whine, they howl, they hack
up vile substances and often they stink worse than an alley cat.
Defeated, I went to work in a lab.
Before I knew it, I married, had
babies and found myself straddled with a huge hankering to hold onto
some semblance of my prior self, the one who boasted functioning brain
cells and the ability to express myself in complete sentences. I
started writing.
As luck or ability or tenacity
would have it, I landed a column in a local newspaper. Initially, I
wrote simply for the high of a byline. Then, the newspaper paid me for
my 450-word effort. Somehow, money provided a rush all its own.
I never thought I’d grow up to
be a writer. Even when it happened, I was the last to know. I found
out when my son shared the family resume with a new friend.
“My dad’s a civil engineer,” my son said.
“Cool,” the friend replied. “What does your
mom do?”
“She’s a writer,” he offered.
“What kind of writer?” the friend inquired.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I think she TRIES
to write funny.”
I suppose some would say I ended up
shoveling manure, after all.