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."