the hardest there is.

Stuck again in a car with a strange man. This time I'm driving myself to my office with Ken riding along so that he can take my car back to the garage to figure out why my check engine light insists on shining. Ken makes a couple of banal comments about the weather and the brightness of the sun as we drive towards it. I ask him a couple of questions about the software they use in the garage, trying to gauge how similar it is to the applications that I write for trucks. It becomes clear that Ken is just a change-the-tires-check-the-oil kind of guy. When I ask him if he likes his job, he thinks for a moment before saying that he doesn't mind it.

"Okay, so what do you really want to do?" I ask.

"Race cars." No hesitation in his voice this time.

"Fair enough," I laugh, delighted at such big dreams.

"Yeah, I mean, what I'm doing now, it's automotive, so that's a start."

"Well, have you ever done any actual racing?"

"Well, yeah, I mean, I've done some. I just, you know, five years ago, I thought I would be closer to it by now."

"I imagine that's a tough thing to break into."

"It's about the hardest there is, that I know of."

I think to myself that the hardest field to break into probably is the one you really want. In any case, I am no longer delighted. I wonder how many people are stuck in dead-end jobs that they cling to because it bears some resemblance to what they really want. How many middle-aged men are still changing tires after twenty years because they wanted to race cars when they were twenty-five? I wondered how long Ken will say "I want to race cars" before switching it to "I used to want to race cars."

The world is full of accountants who wanted to be astronauts, cashiers who wanted to play for the Miami Dolphins, computer programmers who wanted to be writers. Every time you meet a salesperson or a bank clerk or a delivery person, you have to wonder if they're working the job they dreamed of when they were eight or sixteen or even twenty-five years old. Few people give up on their dreams instantly, it's a gradual process where reality and sensibility slowly get their grip on you, and then one day you wonder whatever happened to that kid who wanted to race cars.