On Not Becoming A Paleontologist

My very first career - decided upon as of 8 years old - was to be a paleontologist.

I loved dinosaurs.  I had a fairly large collection of them that I would arrange on my fabulous cave playset (purchased from Sears and Roebuck) in various poses and forms - the old style ones that had only plastic colors (blue stegosauri, brown T. Rexs).  I had almost all the dinosaur models from Aurora.  I had several books that I read and re-read.  I wrote stories about them, developed narratives for them as they marched across the plastic sheet with ponds and trees and up over the plastic cliffs.

Frankly, I am not quite sure which this career field fell out of favor.  I want to say it was by the time I entered high school for reasons I cannot fully appreciate - after all, it is not like I ever came up with a better career path (to this day).  Perhaps I just got bored with them and moved on to other things - now that I think about it, this was about the time that Role Playing Games entered my consciousness.  Somehow in the longer run, I wonder if this was the better choice.

Would I have been happy with a life as a paleontologist? Oh, probably not.  The career field is pretty limited and it involves either a lot of begging for funding or working for low wages.  But if I think about it there is plenty that I might have like as well:  doing something I found engaging, traveling to desolate places and spending weeks away from .

I still have my original dinosaurs tucked away in a box - they have served me and served my children and hopefully will someday serve my grandchildren. I am sure that now they have some small monetary value (simply from the virtue of being old) but I will probably never part with them - not just from the fact that they have nostalgic value but for the fact that in some small way, they started me down the path of imagination and learning that I have continued with to this day.