Asked multiple, numerous, endless times as a youngster, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I honed my answer down to a clean three professions:

• An author
• A songwriter
• A cartoonist

All of us were asked this question and, I surmise, have a list of three things we have always wanted to become. Maybe four. Maybe one. But somewhere in our minds, a list.

My list changed growing up. In second grade I wanted to be an NFL player or a professional baseball player. My dad once told me that if I practiced enough I could do anything.

That statement still rings true with me. I doubt that I could have been in the NFL or the MLB, but considering I stopped playing pretty early in my life, and that I never really did much beyond going to practice, sure, maybe, there was a one in a million chance for me.

As for these three jobs, I’ve gotten a bit closer. As a teacher for twenty-eight years as well as a camp counselor and administrator for fifteen years, these are exactly the things that I found myself fitting into those roles, over and over again.

As a varsity cross country coach for six years I started writing extensive post-race reports for the team, sometimes a few pages worth. The end of the year album contained those writings along with our race times and results.

As a middle school science teacher, I wrote many songs that I performed in class. The culmination of these was “The Middle School Science Song” that I wrote in my final year of teaching middle school science six years ago. I wrote a new verse every day and started class off singing the newest verse along with the chorus, “Science class goes way too fast/Science class yes I wish it lasted/all day ok yes I’m trying to say/I love science class the best”.

Pure propaganda.

As for my cartooning dream, as a summer camp counselor I also was editor of the weekly camp newspaper, The Clocktower Times. At the point I took it over it was a biweekly effort that mostly had cabin reports from the counselors. I assigned articles to my fellow staff members and established columns for many of them. I began to write a comic strip called “Petey the Stick” that followed the life of Petey as he navigated the turmoils of being a piece of wood. 

In the early 2000’s I started writing a young adult novel, “The Fireboy of Nogard”, that I eventually finished, edited down from five hundred thousand words to about three hundred thousand, and proceeded to not look at it since. I might have sent it out to a publisher or two, but nothing beyond that. 

In the early 2010’s I took classes and finally earned an MFA in poetry, taking a sabbatical from my teaching job to finish the degree in 2012. During that time I had a few poems published in minor journals, but within a few months just abandoned sending them out. And writing them.

All this to say I’m here to change that. My website is a solid venue to practice writing, to self-publish in a blog-style format poems, essays, and this form, the Hard Twenty, where I give myself twenty minutes to write, an effort to write more of a blog post, recognizing that my schedule, albeit seemingly open as a retired teacher, doesn’t always give me time for longer essays and even for poems I find worthy to post.

I recently wrote a kids poem and was ready to publish it when I realized that I want my kids poems to be accompanied by a sketch or drawing I do myself. The other posts all have images that I’ve edited from pictures I took, a skill I think I’m getting better at.

Knowing I wanted a sketch, I halted in my effort to publish the poem and started drawing. I found myself trying to develop a cartoon character. My two favorite cartoons are Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, and I’ve been playing around with a young boy that looks a bit like Charlie Brown and a bit like Calvin.

Perhaps I won’t ever get it, but I’ve found that the more I draw the character, the more I have begun to understand what I’m after. I don’t have the character fully formed in my head, but each iteration spirals around a theme and a person that I know is there. 

That trust that there is something there worth pursuing is the biggest hurdle in any creative work I do. That if I just start “the doing”, the “something” that wants to be created will reveal itself. 

Twenty minutes ago I started “the doing” of this post. 

At the bell, here’s the “something”.