BY KELLY HAGEN
Dad, when you were my age (9), what did you want to be when you grew up? - JellyBean, daughter
Uh … either a semi-truck driver or a cartoon duck. Let me explain.
My Uncle Glenn (his real name is Martin, but that was your great-grandpa’s name, so everybody called him Glenn, except for your great-grandma, who convinced your dad when he was really little that his name was “Uncle Bum” because reasons …) drove a semi-truck across the U.S. when I was really little.
And I can remember always really enjoying time spent in the car, driving across the desolate prairies of North Dakota. Plus, he had a bed in the back of the cab! Awesome, right? Do you mean I can just drive all day, pull over to the side of the road, sleep in the back of the truck, and do the same thing over again the next day? Where do I sign up?
Then, for a while, I really wanted to be a janitor. Because I really like having a lot of keys, for whatever reason. I like the jangling sound they make.
I can recall being convinced in 1992, while watching the U.S. “Dream Team” play at the Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, that I was for sure going to play on the 2000 U.S. men’s basketball squad. Not exactly sure why I thought that was going to happen for me, since I had just finished an entire season “playing” for our junior high basketball team at a small Class B school and scored exactly zero points the whole year. But I’ve never lacked for confidence.
Except for that period of time when my life’s goal was to have a lot of keys.
When I was a senior in high school, I still didn’t have a good working plan for what I wanted to do with my life. I, along with your Uncle Erik, was always pretty good at art. And we loved cartoons. So, Erik hoped to become an animator or to design greeting cards. And I just wanted to be a cartoon character, if possible. Daffy Duck, preferably, but I’d have also settled for Spider-Man.
Then I remember my guidance counselor explaining to me that Daffy Duck wasn’t a serious career option, and that I ought to identify something I was good at doing and had a possible path toward earning money to support myself. So I selected … accountant.
I don’t know. I took Accounting I and II my senior year, and I was relatively good at it. Didn’t so much enjoy adding numbers together, then subtracting them and trying to balance things out to zero at the end. But I knew how to do it, so that’s what I was going to do.
Fast-forward to finals week, my first semester of college. I’m in a bathroom at Bismarck State College, in the middle of my Accounting 101 final test, and I’m just realizing I have no idea what I’m doing. And that was Daddy’s first-ever panic attack.
I dropped out of college after that first year and worked at Wendy’s and Walmart. Anyplace that started with a W, I was there.
I knew I could do another “w” word: I could write. But in 1998, all anyone could tell me was, “Don’t become a writer. There’s no money in writing. You can’t support yourself or a family as a writer. Journalism is a fad that’s wearing off.” So, I didn’t even consider it.
Until I finally did. Because I had no other ideas. I went back to college, majored in mass communications, with an emphasis in print journalism (I could have emphasized in “online writing,” but I was convinced the internet was a fad too, so I took the safe bet of print newspapers because reasons …) and that’s the path I’ve been on ever since.
Basically, it’s the same thing as being a professional cartoon character. I’m just daffy, in that way.
Kelly Hagen is a former daily newspaper writer and editor, and currently works in communications for a nonprofit organization in Bismarck, North Dakota. He has been married to Annette for 10 sweet years, and they have two sweet kids. If you have a sweet question you’d like to Ask A Dad, send an e-mail to kelly.hagen@gmail.com.
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