When I Grow Up

Every child has various dreams about what they want to be when they grow up. Usually, it is things that thrill them in childhood. Things like pilot, astronaut, doctor, cowboy etc. As a very small child, I had a fantasy that I would grow up to be a cop...somehow, I found them chivalrous creatures at that point of time or maybe it's because I so vividly remember the police bringing my little brother Michael home when he slipped out the back door unnoticed to follow our mom to work. That was when I was five years old...by the time I turned six, my goals in life had changed, refined and evolved.

I was perhaps a little more than six years old when my mother asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. My refined and evolved resolution to this problem was simple...I wanted to be a goat I'm sure there was laughter...there had to have been laughter! I remembered explained in searing maturity that as a goat, I would just travel the world, eat whatever could reach my mouth and poop wherever I want. 

I was a child then, I am a grown woman now...and today if I were to think what I really want to be...I would never say goat. I have grown, learned, matured, thrived and understood the perils of being a goat. Therefore, if today I could be something else, I would honestly want to be a lemur.

Lemur? Here’s why...

• I understand how the food chain works - A lemur isn't at the top of the food chain but that is why it is harder for it to starve to death. It’s diet is moderate and abundant. Also, a lemur isn't a very big or nutritious creature as food, so it has lesser natural predators. It is a bit like butter, actually. You like the butter, you like to eat it too, but you can’t really consume a lot of butter at a time unless it is spread...on bread, that is!
• I would jump, walk, climb, ride, and swing - A lemur can jump across trees, walk across plain land, climb trees, ride the breeze using leaves of trees and swing from branch to branch. In fact, Madagascar the movie shows us that lemurs can even dance with bears!
• I would be naughty cute - I saw a documentary of Steve Irwin in Madagascar once; it said that the ring-tailed lemurs were the naughtiest of all species of lemurs. They would observe you from hiding, distract you sometimes, and very cold-bloodedly steal your assets while your attention was diverted!
• Most importantly, I would still have hands shaped well enough to perform the squeezing action.

You see...there remains absolutely no joy in life if you are deprived of the ability to squeeze things! It's no secret to mankind that stress is relieved by the squeezing of those bouncy, elastic, spherical objects...those little stress balls that we often have in the corner of our desks in our offices. Sometimes I wonder what absolute genius it must have took inventors to figure out which exact action of the human hands was best equipped to relieve stress – men and women alike!

So there you have. What do you want to be when you grew up?

Old Ringtail Lemur by Super Boone Photo via Etsy