I am increasingly impressed as the eleven-year old boy tells me in excited detail about another video he has shot and edited.
He speaks with the confidence and experience of an accomplished film maker, expressing great shock—“You don’t know that?”—whenever he mentions any software unknown to me.
“What do you want to be when you’re older?” I ask him, expecting to hear ‘film maker’.
“I want to have a big grocery,” he says firmly. “It will be big and yellow and located in Florida.”
As he describes this grocery in further detail. (“It will start small and get big”), I get the feeling that one day he will indeed have that yellow grocery in Florida.
Our conversation gets me wondering about the random adults I encounter on a daily basis. When they were children, what did they want to be in adulthood?
A roadside fruit vendor tells me that he used to love to fight with other boys and dreamed of being in the army. This dream came true, as he had been a ‘man in uniform’ for three years.
“When I was a little girl I wanted to be a nurse,” says a shop owner in Crown Point. “Then when I was in my teens I had an interest in psychiatry and wanted be a psychiatric nurse. I like to study people. I have a fascination with peoples’ minds...whether it’s a sick head or just a mind that’s different. But my father didn’t want me to go to England and do that, so I went into hospitality...which is still dealing with people.”
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An older woman in the shop at the gas station tells me that when she was small she never thought about what she wanted to be. “In them days we didn’t think about them thing,” she says casually.
A smart-dressed woman on the streets of Scarborough tells me: “You want the honest answer? I wanted to have a desk and a phone. In my vision I was a supervisor.”
“Around age six?” I ask.
She nods.
“And are you that now?”
“Yeah.”
A young Scarborough car park attendant is the only person who gives his name. He is twenty-four year old Apollos Johnson. His name alone sounds like one that belongs to a great man.
“I wanted to be a fireman,” he says. “Then I discovered I also liked food and music, so I wondered how I could be a music chef. I don’t know how to put them together, but I have acquired the skills for both.”
He tells me that he plays the piano and that in Jamaica, where he’s from, he studied culinary arts and is “a level one chef, level two baker and a ‘poissonaire’” (which he explains is a fish chef).
“Someday I want to have my own restaurant and do both, but the two are hard to co-exist,” he says.
“You can create a way for any skills to co-exist,” I tell him. “You could play the piano for your diners while they’re eating...or teach them to cook their own dishes and then you serenade as they prepare.”
He laughs and tells me that he is currently part of a gospel band called ‘Revolutionary’. I wish him the success in his endeavours and go my way.
Even though it may change along the way, it is important to listen to what children wish to be and support them accordingly. Often, the seeds of who we could become are evident in our childhood dreams and aspirations.