Just What Someone Always Wanted

By John O’Bryan

Long ago, when my youngest son Christian was three or four years old, he wanted to be two things when he grew up: a fire truck and a banana.  This may have had something to do with cartoons or maybe it’s in the blood, because I’ve always loved fire trucks, too.

At any rate, from the moment he could communicate with us, he was adamant that he didn’t want to be a fireman, he wanted to be a fire truck. Why he wanted to be a banana was beyond our comprehension.

Christian had an interesting speech pattern that only his brother could decipher. We looked to Wesley for translation when Christian tried to explain what he wanted for dinner, which part of his body he had hurt, or what he wanted to be when he grew up.

Thankfully, he developed out of that phase pretty quickly, but we still have indecipherable recordings of him when he was little at which all of us shake our heads, even Wesley, who long ago lost his ability to translate.

Because of Christian’s lack of verbal acuity, for all we knew he could have been telling us he wanted to be a doctor or a fan dancer, but we relied on Wesley’s interpretation that more than anything his brother wanted to have four wheels and a fire hose. He did have a bedwetting problem for a while, so maybe that was a factor in him wanting to be a pumper truck but in any case, we all got the message.