‘Leo the Late Bloomer’: When Do Dreams Die?

Our days, our minutes, our seconds on this earth are finite.

And none of us know how much time we have.

End of summer always makes me reflective. Maybe it’s because
I was a teacher for 17 years. If there was going to be change, it was going to
happen in the golden days of September.

Like the first day of school.

And the intoxicating smell of new.

Scents of wool sweaters with price tags barely clipped off, oily modeling clay (remember that?), waxy crayons in every color and the shavings from freshly sharpened pencils.

New beginnings.

The mantra in my classrooms was ‘lifelong learner.’ I held it up as a badge. Tried to model it for my kids.

First with six-year-olds. Then with confused, innocent English language learners from Southeast Asia. Later with gifted fourth and fifth graders.

Lately I’ve been thinking more about what it means to be a lifelong learner. 104-year-old IvyBean, the world’s oldest twitterer, was one.

Julia Child, who became a household name with PBS’s The French Chef at 51.

And Peter Mark Roget, who published the first edition of Roget’s Thesaurus at 73. It went on to become the ultimate word-finder reference book.

Then there was Ray Kroc, who was almost 60, crippled by diabetes and arthritis, when he became the owner of a little restaurant chain with golden arches that would sell a billion hamburgers by 1963.

I was showing signs of lifelong learning when I left a secure, cocoon of a classroom to trek to Africa to try to show the world the faces of kids who were dying because they couldn’t get a cup of clean, cold water. And boy, did I learn a lot.

Are you waiting for ‘the
right time’ to grab onto your dream?

Every year I would read the book Leo the Late Bloomer to my first graders. In the story, Leo the tiger cub isn’t reading, writing or speaking yet. Dad is worried. But mom is not. She knows he’ll do all those things and more—when he’s ready.

I called my daughter Kellye my “Leo the Late Bloomer.”

Although she was reading by age 4, she was shy, socially delayed and had no plans after high school but to move to southern California and go for her acting dream.

Broke my heart that she didn’t choose college.

She got a few small roles in Hollywood—on Seinfeld, Beverly Hills 90210 and, in a strange turn of events, a two-year recurring role as Monica Lewinsky on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

But in the end, Hollywood chewed her up and spit her out. Tough to watch as a parent.

I remember the day she said to me, “I’ve been thinking about going to college. But you know what? I’ll be 42 in four years, by the time I get my degree.”

I said,” And how old will you be in four years if you don’t get your degree?”

She didn’t have a good answer.

That time would pass just the same, whether she went to college or not. And she would be 42 either way.

Now, after two years at a local college, with close to a 4.0 GPA, she has been accepted as an Ada Comstock scholar and a “noteworthy entering student” at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts.

And in just two years, she’ll have that degree in theatre arts, with plenty of time to still do something with it.

For both me and my daughter, it was the age of 40 that triggered our is-there-something-else-out-there-for-me. But it just as easily could have been 30 or 50 or 70.

Do you have a dream that is still unfulfilled?

Maybe it isn’t big, like a college degree. Or maybe it’s even bigger than that.

Sometimes just writing it down can be the first step.