This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks reviewers to describe a profession from a book (or movie or TV show) we'd like to try.
It's been a long time since I thought about choosing a profession. As a child I had the usual fantasies about things I thought I'd like to do...horse rancher, ballet dancer, ice dancer, brailler (someone who translated books printed on paper into the usual way into books printed as holes punched into plastic to be read by touch), teacher,soldier, nurse, actor, singer, astronaut, bus driver, carpenter, architect, fashion designer, missionary, secretary, World's Most Accomplished Polymath who did most of those things in the same lifetime, all the things marketed to children by popular books and TV shows. Funny how things like storekeeper, seamer, cook, factory laborer, lineman, were never marketed to children. There was this assumption that jobs that are learned by doing them would be learned from children's parents. My parents didn't do those jobs and my education about how they were done was limited. But I got lots of ideas about possible jobs from books. Most of those books are no longer available but there were...
* My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara (not the first book about horse ranches I'd read, but the one I reread over the years)
* Little Golden Books called Little Ballerina, Little Skater, Little Horseman, and there may have been more; madly popular, but most copies were probably loved to death by children and puppies by 1980
* Helen Keller's Story of My Life and all those other books about her and Anne Sullivan
* These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder
* The only book besides the Bible ever displayed on my Tennessee grandmother's coffee table: a Boot Camp Yearbook featuring Dad's younger brother and a lot of other "boots" climbing on big, exciting frames, running races, shooting targets, and winning awards. It didn't bother me that they were all men because I knew there were boot camps for women too. Anyway the young men all seemed to be having fun, and probably all their mothers loved reading the books about them; Grandma surely did.
* I don't remember the name of the picture book about Nurse Nina, but I remember liking the book and fantasizing about being a nurse for a whole evening. The fantasy didn't recur often over the years, though. Being a nurse was something I learned from my parents. It was not a fun job. You missed out on things with your family to be with some boring sick person, and then the sick person died. Well, sometimes the sick person got better, but as they were all eighty or ninety years old they couldn't be expected to stay very well for very long. Mother kept herself motivated (1) by being so hypothyroid she wasn't fit for more exciting jobs, and (2) by thinking of each patient as a test for something she was learning about wholistic health. As an adult I have worked with younger patients who had better prognoses and were more fun to work with, but I've not looked for jobs where my Geriatric Nursing Assistant certificate was relevant or displayed it on any walls.
* All the publicity stories about actors and singers
* Between 1965 and 1975 there was a real barrage of mostly bad books about astronauts and space travel, often suggesting that the job might some day be done by children, which was the attraction. But the books that suggested that kids would be astronauts weren't very credible and, the more I learned about real space travel, the more I realized it was not for me.
* The Bingety Bangety School Bus
* I don't now remember a book about carpentry, specifically, so much as I remember that all my male relatives and several of the female ones did carpentry and construction jobs. For one aunt building houses was her weekend "fun" job that she did to relax after working in a factory all week. But then there were all those Sunday School books reminding children that Jesus was a carpenter. The trade to which my tall, broad-shouldered relatives gravitated might be an especially virtuous profession. And I grew fast, until the celiac gene kicked in around age five or six; the first few times I met other children my age, I was bigger and stronger than they were; according to a chart my pediatrician believed in, I was going to be about six feet tall. I am, of course, 5'4", but still I've done a lot of light construction work and enjoyed it. I might have enjoyed being married to Bob the Builder, who was invented after I grew up.
* The Childcraft Encyclopedia, "new" edition, with its biography of Frank Lloyd Wright. I didn't like his main influences on modern architecture. I liked his iconoclastic attitude.
* The Barbie doll catalogue. Barbie was mostly a model but she did some designing, according to the catalogue. One of her most popular outfits was the pink Chanel-style suit she wore while carrying the portfolio of her designs to meet with the garment production staff. I liked the idea of designing. I never fantasized about being a model, though in my twenties that was an odd job I did. It wasn't that I thought models had to be especially beautiful, or even tall, thin, or blonde; a quick look at any catalogue showed that they didn't. Decent-looking was usually enough, and decnt-looking I could do. I never thought that would be an interesting job. Nor was it. Modelling was strictly for quick cash. But design does interest me, still.
* Lots of Sunday School books about missionaries
* Typing for Business, which came with my first typewriter, and The Efficient Secretary, which I found at a thrift store later
I think the field of children's books could do with a few more realistic books about careers, including the ones that don't market some sort of special educational program. Children are not the ones who decided bricklaying, electrical engineering, or assembly line work were boring jobs. (Actually, when I worked in a factory at university, that too-efficient-for-the-human-body school of management had already been phased out--during the Reagan Administration--and laborers changed positions now and then to work different muscles on different tasks, which I thinkwas a very good thing.) Children can stand and watch people do quite laborious work, on construction sites, in garages, wherever, and be fascinated. The Nephews, their grandmothers, and I all liked Bob the Builder when that series came out. We could do with series about Mike the Mechanic and Cathy the Cashier and Bo the Busboy, too. (Robby the Robot Replacement for all of those jobs is not sustainable and is likely to have a short life.)
Another picture book I saw and liked, as an adult, was called A Day in the Life of a Rock Musician, and seemed like a useful corrective to all those promotions of the toxic "star" system. Illustrated with good clear color photos, that book showed how a few nice normal people who had day jobs and families and nice houses in the same neighborhood had formed a successful local band. The featured member of the band had a soundproofed basement to practice and compose in during the week. On weekends he rehearsed with the band and performed at local venues. No crazy excesses of "young money"--this band was relatable, real, and wholesome, even if they liked loud music with a heavy beat.
Finally a shout to some nonfiction books I read in the early 1990s...May Berenbaum's books didn't make me want to be an entomologist. I didn't want to be one until, as a professional writer, I noticed that this is an ample field for niche writing. I read entomology to show a professor who worried about "feminization of the sciences" that I wasn't going to be scared off psychology by the idea of doing neurological experiments on insects. But Berenbaum did reassure me that being an entomologist was possible--that other universities might not indulge insecure, envious males as badly as Berea did.
