Hero

When I was a little kid I would pretend that I was a hero. I remember having an old navy blue sweater that I'd tie around my neck and pretend it was a cape. I can't remember where I got the worn and slightly smelly sweater, but I didn't mind. To me, it was the best darn cape any kid could ever have and that was good enough.

 Instead of having super powers like most heroes, I wanted to be more like Batman or the Green-hornet and have awesome gadgets and gizmos. So one day, I went to the dollar store to buy a toy squirt-gun. Despite it being fairly cheap, it lasted me for few good years. I still remember what it looked like. It had a pink trigger and yellow lines on the handle. It also had some hints of green on the stock. Overall, it looked ridiculous.

Villains, in my eyes, were those over the top guys who could have gotten the job done had they not tempted fate and explained what they were going to do right before they killed the hero. To me, that didn't seem like fun. So instead, I just pretended there was a bunch of robbers. To an onlooker, a majority of my time playing was just me squirting water at all the plants in the garden. My mother seemed pretty happy about this for some reason. But after thinking about it a little more, mom was probably just happy that she didn't have to water the plants.

It seems the closer I get to actually growing up and becoming an adult, the more I look back on my life and think. Could I actually do anything significant in my lifetime or am I doomed to walk the earth and never have any effect on the world? It's times like those that make me think of my old navy blue sweater and my oddly colored squirt gun and remember when I was a hero.