What do you want to be when you grow up? This is a question that’s frequently asked of youngers. Youngers usually answer quickly and with great clarity. They want to “be” firemen, doctors, nurses, lawyers, cowboys, cowgirls, veterinarians, and the like.

As we age, we get more indecisive about what we want to be when we grow up because we think the career goal is unobtainable. This is partly because other options materialize and partly because dreams fall by the wayside.

I wanted to be a veterinarian. Turns out that I didn’t have the aptitude or the money to follow through on what was then a life-long ambition.

I soon had it verified that I lacked the aptitude. And because I lacked the aptitude I remained ineligible for scholarship funding. Hopes dashed, I jumped off one bandwagon and onto another. I became an English major.

I didn’t consider going on in an English-related field early on because I deduced that jobs in this discipline would be limiting. And so finding a job was difficult, and keeping a job was even more difficult. I didn’t have the foresight to see what was coming. I liked being an undergraduate, liked taking classes in poetry, nonfiction, literature. I in fact happily bounced from one genre to the next. And I liked being a graduate student, even though I found having to focus on learning the discourse conventions of single genres at time to be limiting.

And when it was all said and done, I was not able to cut it as a Jill of One Trade. So here I am now growed up. I have reached a plateau, and am now looking down the other side. Actually, I have begun the downward descent, Yesterday Pete, who is a Jack of All Trades and my financial consultant told me that he looked at my Social Security update and that it would not make any sense for me to take on a minimum wage job because the amount one receives when they are of retirement age is related to your last job, not the overall amount that one has earned. So much for working for the recycling center during the fair. Imagine that! If I blithely took on this job I’d be giving the government money. Don’t want to do that. Don’t want to work on Maggie’s Farm no more, no more.

I must find a higher paying job. This is unlikely because I’m now looking over the edge of the plateau. Few who are on the far side of it, that is the slippery slope side, find less than minimum wage work. I tried, could not get a job at the college because of age discrimination issues. Ya de daah.

So I’m going to do my best to enjoy the ride because it’s all downhill from this point on. Going down the plateau is going to be twice as fast as going up it.

Next: 171. 6/24/17: A Conversation with Rainbow