When all glamour is lost

By Adam Magnoni
Remember when you were but a child? Remember the long days playing as if you were an adult? I would create in my imagination that I was a cowboy riding the fences and blowing my harmonica around a glowing campfire. Or, I was an astronaut being blasted into space, and once there, the amount of green men to defend against earth was never ending. When I was young, I believed that these things were viable career options for me. I don’t say this because I believe that the opportunity wasn’t provided (in fact I still want to be either a pirate or private detective), but because I believe that when you have a pure idea about something, that something can provide you with no sorrow. As soon as this pure idea is subject to the real world and its strict guidelines, it no longer holds any wonder or mystery. It becomes just another thing that we had originally used our imagination to escape from. My father is a newspaperman. He chose a communicative path that I am all too happy to follow. Now, I have always been a writer. I keep a journal and have always been a bit of a bookworm. So when, after I had exhausted the idea that I could live life on love alone and realized a career must be chosen (a smarter man than me once said that careers are but an invention of the twentieth century), I thought what more noble pursuit is there than a man out on the street working to bring the truth to the people. The money isn’t any good, but that’s all right