My childhood memories aren't as poignant as, say, my brother's, who still probably remembers our grandmother's old house in Banga. But this I recall: that I was in preschool in 1992, seated beside classmates with runny noses (which I despised looking at), starting to learn my alphabet, and enjoying the drills on my DISTAR reading materials.
I remember a conversation I once had with my classmate John Michael Daraug during recess. I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. "A hold-upper," he said.
Intrigued, I asked him why.
"I want to have lots of money." I told him that was going to be a dangerous job; the police would be after him. But his explanation seemed logical at the time.
"What do you want to become, Lance?"
"An astronaut," I said proudly.
How I badly wanted to be an astronaut! My favorite book then was the seventh volume of Childcraft entitled The Universe, which I had read every day when I stayed in my grandparents' house in Polomolok.
The night sky fascinated me. My aunts would tell me to point to the moon and ask for bread, a drill I found pointless, but they seemed ecstatic when I did it; so like any obedient child, I did. Many times I looked at the moon quietly and made out outlines of a rabbit or a woman. I liked Saturn which I considered the most beautiful of all the planets because of its rings. I enjoyed reading about Jupiter, and I wondered why the Earth wasn't any bigger. I didn't care much for Uranus or Neptune, and I thought Pluto was too small and distant.
The idea of floating on air excited me, too. I learned about Neil Armstrong, and I wished I could be like him: inside a spacecraft, donning a super-cool suit, flying.
After some time, I got over my fascination for astronomy. Children's preferences, like childhood itself, are transient.
Let's fast-forward to 2012. I've realized that my grasp of physics isn't enough to land me in NASA. Neil Armstrong died last month. I'm now studying to be a doctor.
But some things never change, I suppose, like the wonder of looking at the stars at night, remembering that their twinkling may well be a thousand years old . . . and the humbling thought that I am but a speck of dust in the greater scheme of things, yet the God who created all of these is mindful of and knows me (Psalm 8:4).
I wanted to be a waitress, so I could serve dad coffee all the time, complete with toasted bread. :-)
ReplyDelete- marj
my sister wanted to be a bathroom cleaner (hindi yung object ah as in yung person talaga) :) -aa
ReplyDeleteYou and my brother have the same childhood dream! He would have us read him a Reader's Digest article on Armstrong and the moon landing every single day. That came after wanting to be a carpenter. Then he grew up and made tons of money. Sometimes when he's having a spoiled fit, I wish he became a carpenter instead. hahaha :)
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