When I was a kid, from about ages seven to, say, 12 or 13, I wanted to be a jewel thief. Other girls in my class wanted to be teachers, veterinarians, ballerinas; I had no interest in any of these vocations. I wanted to scale fences, steal golden monkeys, frequent remote locales, invariably pursued by menacing strangers with exotic accents and freakish scars. Okay, yes, it’s possible that I may have watched just a little too much television as a child, but I could have simply aspired to be a ditzy redneck with frayed cutoffs and a barely-subverted sexual appetite for my first cousins-at least I had more imagination than that.
The jewel thief aspiration was more than just an idle dream, though. I worked just as hard to reach my goal as my best friend Becca did to reach hers; she wanted to be a rock star. Weekends, we’d cover every square inch of my bed with an “audience” comprised of stuffed animals and Strawberry Shortcake dolls, and lip sync to Becca’s Mini Pops album for hours. Just in case you missed the early 1980’s rock/pop phenomenon, Mini Pops was a British band of little kids who covered the latest pop hits. This particular album had “Green Door,” “Video Killed the Radio Star,” “Turning Japanese,” “Morning Train,” all sung falsetto by kids in leather pants and spiked hair with cockney British accents… It was genius.
Anyway, after a few hours of hardcore prep in the fine art of winning over audiences worldwide via my childhood bedroom, it was Becca’s turn to return the favor: We became world class criminals. I created this game called, appropriately enough, Jewel Thief: Three of my mom’s biggest, ugliest 1970’s Avon Classics rings were placed on the roof outside my bedroom window. The neighborhood boys were recruited to serve as security guards patrolling the yard, while Becca and I worked in tandem to steal the rings. Naturally, we couldn’t just go through my bedroom to get them, but had to get to the roof from the outside without being caught by the boys and without aid of a ladder. The game went well until, trying to scale the side of the house one Saturday afternoon, my foot slipped and went through the laundry room window. Until then, my mom considered my obsession quirky but kind of amusing; I think that was the day she stopped seeing the humor and started being mildly concerned.
At some point, around the same time that my friend Becca gave up on being a rock star and started dating the boy that would eventually be the father of her three children, I decided that the idea of becoming a jewel thief was simply too unrealistic. Sure, there had to be people in the world who made their livings that way, but little girls from moderately respectable beginnings in Thomaston, Maine, just didn’t grow up to steal the King’s ransom. It simply wasn’t done. I put away my Super Spy Starter kit, stopped trying to pick all of the locks in my neighborhood, and ceased casing the Camden National Bank downtown, recognizing that it would not, in fact, be my first big bank job. I grew up.
Now, a good 15 years after my foot went through that laundry room window, I am ostensibly an adult. In place of the dream I’d once had for my life as a career criminal, I have an apartment and a dog and a pickup truck that appears at the moment to be in relatively good working order. And what have I chosen as my vocation? What monumentally realistic goal, what career set in the bedrock of stability and maturity, have I claimed as my own?
I am a writer. It may seem on the surface, to the uninformed masses, that this is a relatively harmless choice. The uninformed masses, however, would be wrong. And now, three months from earning my Master’s degree in Creative Writing, I’m beginning to see my error. Writers wind up dead at a startling rate: Suicides by hanging, pills, gunshots, drowning, accidental and not-so-accidental drug overdose…The list goes on. Do jewel thieves kill themselves at this rate? I could find no statistics to support my answer, but I think not. It would seem that a personality drawn to adventure and quick cash would have no time for the mental anguish a writer experiences on a regular basis. Jewel thieves just go out and steal diamonds; writers sit around alone in their pajamas drinking scotch and torturing themselves about why jewel thieves steal diamonds.
Further, writers don’t make that much money. At all. And if they do make money, it’s by either (a) selling the Novel-to-End-All-Novels and then torturing themselves to turn out more Novels to End All Novels until they ultimately lose their minds, (b) piecing together a living by writing for every magazine, newspaper, and on-line forum known to man, or (c) just giving in and writing novelizations of Alias and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. How does that sound like a good life, in any way, shape, or form?
So, I’ve decided that my first instinct was probably a good one. Does it really make any less sense to make a living by stealing jewels than writing about people who steal jewels? At least I know that when I rob the Duke of Windsor, I’m taking action, making a stand -and will go home with sparkly diamonds in my pockets, to boot. Novels wrinkle and fade, the paper gets worn or the idea gets overused, but-as another writer who wished he led a much more exciting life once said-Diamonds are Forever.