“Wanna Be a Writer?”

I doubt that it was ever actually true that every five-year-old boy used to want to grow up to be a fireman and that every five-year-old girl wanted to be a ballerina. They're both exacting occupations demanding excessive physical exertion and some degree of danger to one's health. My grandfather, for example, as a firefighter was seriously injured in the famous Long Block fire in Utica NY in 1947. Today they'd have internet crowdfunding to help him get back on his feet. Back then he just did the best he could until he just couldn't, which in his case was another twenty years. I have no idea what I wanted to do when I was five, though it was probably something that could be done while sitting down. Professional televison-watching, a pursuit at which I could have been considered a wunderkind, was no option. Writing was laborious and almost excruciating for me until about age eleven. Suddenly, despite displaying the penmanship skills of what they used to call an “imbecile,” I was fluent and even verbose in my scrawls. Learning to type allowed me to skirt any possible imputation of chirographic idiocy—and I wrote even more. So, writing—which could be done without standing, walking, or shoveling—was looking like a possible career path. And (against my natural inclination) I worked at it. So when I said I wanted to be a writer, I could brandish pages of smudgy typescript an