The window into my childhood sometimes opens for me. I can catch glimpses of scenes from the past. The image most vivid is of two small boys - my best friend and me - sitting on the steps of my back porch. Our conversation is always the same. It begins when one asks the other: "What are you going to be when you grow up?"

The answers then are much like the answers children give today. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" A cowboy, a teacher, a football player, a doctor.

Being Superman was my personal ambition, at least until that black day of maturity, when he went the way of Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.

Astronauts had not yet been invented. Even our parents didn't know what a paramedic was.

The answers we gave changed as we grew older, but the question never left. I think it'…