What do you want to be when you grow up?

What if you’re interested in everything?

I don’t mean merely curious about the world. I mean so interested, so curious, that you want to do everything. Be everyone.

You see your first ballet at age five, and you want to be a ballerina. You read a YA biography of Marie Curie, and you want to be a scientist. You watch Quincy, M.E. on television, and you want to be a coroner. And how could you not want to be Margaret Mead when later, in college, you read about her? Or Margaret Bourke-White, for goodness sakes? But you also want to be a trail lawyer, a pioneer woman. You want to start a restaurant—a chef, a baker!-- the table settings created by you, because you’d also like to be potter. You want to be a long-haul trucker, a nutritionist. You’d like to grow wasabi for a living, lead women on wilderness treks, train service dogs. You’d like to be a pilot, an orthopedic surgeon, a stone mason.  

Because I have wanted to do so many different things with my life, there was really only one thing I could do with my life: Be a writer.

As a writer I can get a glimpse into those lives that I think I would like to live. Sometimes a glimpse is all you need to discover…uh, no, not for me. Sometimes a glimpse makes you want to apply to Law School (almost did this) or take a ceramics class (did this) or apprentice with an old-world craftsman (still a dream). Sometimes a glimpse becomes a research project, and some research projects become books. And then the book ends, and you get to go out to glimpse again.

At the moment, sitting in a basement apartment in Seattle after a long day of teaching, watching Moonstruck on my laptop and eating microwave popcorn, I just want to be me, doing this. Although, at one time, I really really wanted to be Cher.