It’s not a B-I-G birthday. It’s not like I can get my learner’s permit to drive this week, and I’m not going to be getting Social Security either.
This birthday wasn’t my 18th birthday when Uncle Sam noticed me. Nor was it my 21st birthday when Budweiser did. (That birthday did make me vow to NEVER drink car bombs again until my celebratory wake.)
It also wasn’t my 29th birthday when I decided to leave the profession that I had trained for my entire life, teaching music. That was a rough one. I went through a series of humiliating interviews where I was informed that teachers don’t make good businessmen. (Funny, I always envisioned this bumper sticker on my dad’s car, “My B-average son is your honor’s student’s boss.”)
During that time, however, I had one interviewer who turned to me with his opening question and challenged the entire direction of my life. He said, “If you could do anything in this world without limitations, what would you like to do?” Let’s see, I was a professional trumpet player and a teacher. Without hesitation, I turned, looked him directly in the eyes and said, “I’d be a writer.”
He told me he wouldn’t hire me, but that I should follow my dream. What dream? I hadn’t actually verbalized that idea until that very minute. In fact, the question was, “Why the heck had I even said that to him?” Oh sure, I had done well in English composition in high school and was exempt from Comp II in college. In fact, when things weren’t going so well for me in music’s toughest class, ear training, it made me realize that a first, let alone a fifth symphony was probably not in my future. That reality hit me so hard that I considered dropping out of music altogether and majoring in writing, but I knew that, unless you became Superman’s Boss, newspaper guys were even more seriously underpaid than teachers, and I didn’t think I wanted to be an ad man.
I was on a life-imposed budget and couldn’t figure out how to get the money to spend even one more year in a journalism school let alone two additional years in business school.
A few months earlier, my mom told me that my cousin, Doris, was selling her ideas to greeting card companies. So I spent a year trying to do that. Not unlike a lot of my work, I think I was ahead of my time because I liked humorous sympathy cards with sayings like: “I was so sorry to hear about your death.” That one just didn’t ring any bells for the folks at American Greetings. I also did a “biggest loser” card with a pair of hand-drawn feet bouncing on a spring inside saying, “Here’s to De-feet!”
After that I tried to write short stories for the Reader’s Digest. In fact, my garage-sale-failure story could probably have been a best seller, but no one really got it either. One of my cartoons was finally published in a professional musician’s magazine. It was an angry angel with a harp who was protesting because he wanted an Arp, a music synthesizer! (You had to be there.)
So, here I sit decades later wondering if I could have developed into Dave Barry’s competition. Erma Bombeck and Art Buchwald were my childhood idols. Let’s face it; I’ll never be a great writer. But I knew for sure that, I never wanted to be an editor or publisher. Come to think of it, I left teaching because I never wanted to be a principal or superintendent either. Looking back from my birthday, however, it’s all I’ve ever done until now. Go to work and boss around supermen (and superwomen). Maybe that should be my next book? “Clark Kent’s Boss, the Delight and De-feet?”
(Nick Jacobs, Windber, international director for SunStone Consulting, LLC is the author of the blog Healinghospitals.com.)
It's my birthday, and I'm not Superman's boss
-
-
-
Comments0
-
-
-
0
Comments (0)
Add comments | Discussion FAQCurrently there are no comments. Be the first to comment!
