Saturday, March 05, 2005

Ambition

One day, when I was about six, I heard something on the radio news about someone being assassinated. I asked my mommy what it meant. She explained that it was what they called it when someone famous was murdered.

I was enraptured. To be so important that your death has its own separate category--and such a gorgeously sibilant one at that--...that seemed to me to be something worth striving for.

And thus it was that I shocked an avuncular friend of the family when, to his friendly question, "Well, and what do you want to be when you grow up?" I calmly replied, "Assassinated."

5 comments:

Ray said...

Heard it on the news when you were six, eh?

Who was it? Tupac? Biggie?

Rachel said...

Very funny, Ray.

Actually, according to http://www.rotten.com/library/history/assassination/ it was probably either Lennon or Sadat.

Gregg P. said...

Hey! Let this serve as your notcie that I will, at some point in the future, steal this story and use it in another format, perhaps a story or screenplay. I'm not proud of this, but I also know it's true.

Great story!

Gregg

Gregg P. said...

And YES, I'll credit you and share some of the many, many millions I earn as a result of your clever comment. Jeez!

Ray said...

When I was six, the Beatles broke up. Not that I noticed. But I think it was commonly known in 1st grade that the Monkees were really the Beatles, they just called themselves the Monkees on TV, and called themselves the Beatles on the radio.

I was in high school when John Lennon was shot.