Mailman

There was one scene that I remember surprisingly from a distant memory, and more surprisingly, which wasn’t my act. I was only a part of the innocent and unthinking audience. It’s a rare chance that I get to recall way too clearly an incident that had happened in my childhood days I had nothing to do with, so this is a shocker for me.

I just finished my first grade in school then; that must have been more than ten years ago. I turned up in my cousin’s pre-school graduation, just for the heck of it, in the same school that I was attending. Like any other kids, I could not stay still on my seat. My butt was itching to discharge itself from the stool. I wanted to go outside and buy myself one of those pink, fluffy cotton candies and double scoop ice cream outside. But being the behaved kid I was, I chose to wait a little longer.

It has been a tradition in Preparatory graduations that every kid is to go in front of the stage, stand at the center of it, introduce himself, followed by an “I want to be…someday”. So that was how it went. But then, everyone was alarmed when a kid, who I used to know by the way because we were service-mates, suddenly wriggled and brawled on the floor while howling when his turn came. When his parents and a couple of teachers went near him to calm him down, he howled harder and screamed that he wanted to be a mailman. Now that was some kind of a clowning. After the ceremony, we knew from his parents that they told him to say that he wanted to be an engineer, when what he really wanted to be was a mailman instead.

I did find it funny. But, when I think about it again now, I had the same dream when I was younger. Not the mailman thing, but the same sort, and not the other sort; the sort that you just get to do the same things every single day, repeat doing those every time, things that are of no complications but seem fun, at least that is what one thinks of them when he was younger.

A cashier - that was what I wanted to be. I thought punching items all day long was fun. However, as I grew older, I realized that it is not a very huge thing to do. It wouldn’t grant me honor and recognition. I would be no one.

As we age and change, our dreams change as well, from the least complicated to the most complicated. I wanted to be a mere cashier in a supermarket. Now, I choose to be someone, and by being a writer, I know I can be someone.

Wherever he is now, I am pretty certain that his dream changed too, into something bigger than becoming a mailman.