We sat under the great oak tree that warm summer evening,
bare feet in the cool, scented grass, our backs against the firm, gnarly trunk
of the oak tree. The crickets sang about us, a cat slunk by, and we could hear
old Uncle Billy’s boisterous laughter from the back porch. It was summer, we
were twelve years old, and we were happy.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Toby asked
suddenly.
“Oh, lots of things,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Tell me what you want to be first,” I said. Toby was my
very best friend, but my dreams were very private.
“Ladies first.” As if he always made a habit of letting the
lady go first! Boys were so exasperating sometimes. They made you go first when
you didn’t want to, and when you wanted to, they went first.
“No,” I said, “you’re the oldest, so you can go first.”
“All right. I want to be a doctor, and find a cure for
something and become very famous. And I’ll build really good hospitals
everywhere, and poor people won’t have to pay to come to them. That’s what I
want to do. Your turn.”
I pulled a piece of grass and folded it into tiny lengths.
“Well,” I began a little hesitantly, “well, I want to become a famous painter,
and paint beautiful pictures that people will remember as long as they live,
and that people will talk about after I am dead. And I want to travel all over
the world and paint pictures of everything I see.”
We were silent, watching the fireflies come out. Around the
block, mothers opened screen doors and began to call their children in. Toby’s
mother called his name, and almost at the same time my mother called me. Slowly
we stood up, reluctant to leave the magic of a summer night.
Toby crossed the street to his lawn, then he ran back. “I
forgot one thing,” he said. “I want to marry you when I grow up.”
I didn’t say it out loud, but I had the same thought.
******
Twelve years later, I went back to visit my family. As the
men smoked on the front porch, and my mother knitted, I went to the old oak
tree. I leaned against the solid old trunk and thought about the summer
evenings of my childhood.
I put my hand on my stomach and whispered to the baby that
was growing in there, “Someday you will play under this tree. Someday you will
tell your dreams to your best friend.”
I felt Toby’s arms around my waist. “Remember when we told
each other our dreams that night when we were about twelve?” he asked. “It
seems so long ago.”
I nodded. What big dreams we’d had then! Toby was a doctor
now, but he worked at a big hospital with twenty other doctors, and he hadn’t
found his cure, yet.
And me – I had a degree in literature, I had taught for
several years while I waited for Toby to finish medical school, and now here I
was, expecting our first child. The only things I painted where the walls in
our new house.
Only one of our dreams had really come true, but that
doesn’t matter to me.
No one ever said you couldn’t dream big.
