Writing has always been my passion. Even when I was a teenager, I was convinced that I was going to write the Great American Novel.
?Catcher in the what?? future generations would question. Oh, the guilt I would feel having knocked J.D. Salinger's classic (and my personal favorite) book off of required reading lists across the country. There is only so much room at the top, after all.
All I needed was something to write with. Most publishing houses, as far as I knew, didn't accept Great American Novels written on spiral notebooks with No. 2 pencils.
One afternoon, my mother surprised me with the unexpected gift of a home computer. She beamed with excitement as she unveiled it atop our kitchen table, complete with 1 megabyte of RAM and dual 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives. The hard drive was as big as a '57 Chevy and hummed just as loud. It was the premiere piece of technology in 1984.
The only problem was that it was the year 2000, and most kids my age were already using their computers to download songs from Napster. This computer didn't have any programs like Napster. In fact, it didn't even have a home screen. When you booted it up, all you saw was a small blinking vertical bar, egging you to start your first sentence on an unnamed word processor.
None of that mattered to me though. At the time we couldn't have afforded a Giga Pet, much less a new computer. However my mother, well aware of my writing dreams, saw this hunk of junk at a yard sale and seized the opportunity. At least I had my dot-matrix printer. Sure you had to tear off the edges of the side of the paper and my finished products looked more like a scroll than a manuscript, but I couldn't have been happier.
My mom was always the biggest supporter of my dreams. I could have said that I wanted to be a Rock Star, and I'm sure I would've come home one day and found a slightly used ukulele on the kitchen table.
Getting the opportunity to chase your dreams, regardless of how impractical they are, are paramount moments in a child's development. Luckily, there are enough adults out there who appreciate the value of a childhood dream.
There are theater teachers who direct local plays featuring future Academy Award nominees, and Tiny Tutus community class instructors who teach little ballerina's their first dance steps, which will ultimately no doubt prepare them for their Broadway debut in ?Swan Lake.?
For any kid who ever watched a basketball game and wanted to ?Be like Mike,? there are more than 60 volunteer coaches in the Hoopsters Youth Basketball Program waiting to teach them the fundamentals of the game. That's nearly 600 championship rings for Eureka youth alone that the NBA is going to have to pony up for.
Sure there's a chance that not every kid whose family signs them up for an art class is going to see their work hung at MoMA, but that's not really what matters. The important thing is that children learn there are people in their life who believe in them, which in turn gives them the confidence to believe in themselves -- the effects of which will long outlive their desire to become Eureka's first superhero.
As for me, my own dreams have evolved and I'm constantly adding more to the list; but at least now I'm equipped with the right tools to chase them down. These days I write on a Google Chromebook laptop (much smaller than a '57 Chevy), and spend my time finding inspiration in the community for a column that wouldn't even exist if not for that hunk of junk computer, purchased at a yard sale so long ago.
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Brian Millett is the Recreation Coordinator for the City of Eureka. He can be reached at bmillett@ci.eureka.ca.gov.
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