Veterinarian manqué

Marie flew home today. But one evening while she was here, we sat up talking for a while about Schmidt. And I had one of those moments where I said something and only then realized that I had never known it before—that I had literally figured it out in the process of explaining it to someone else.

We were talking about television. Whenever she is awake, Ma Schmidt has the television on as a distraction. She started this habit back when she could still hear, but suffered from severe tinnitus; the noise from the television blotted out her perception of the ringing in her ears. Now it's just a habit; but because she's too deaf (and too forgetful) to engage in normal conversation, it's not a crazy habit.

But what to watch? Schmidt says he doesn't want the channel turned to national news, because he finds the national news too depressing. (Like most of my friends, Schmidt suffers from some degree of Trump derangement syndrome, and evaluates all developments in national or world news accordingly.) In practice, Schmidt normally switches to the National Geographic Wild network, to watch reruns of The Incredible Dr. Pol, a reality-show about the veterinarian Dr. Jan Pol. Sometimes he changes it up by turning to some other animal documentary instead.

The thing is, I think Ma Schmidt is profoundly bored by all these animal shows!

The Schmidts live on a farm, though they no longer have any animals. (They let a neighbor graze his cattle on their fields.) They have certainly spent a lot of time around animals over the years. But that was never Ma Schmidt's passion. Pa Schmidt was the one who wanted to live on a farm. Ma went along with him because she loved him, and they were married, and, well … you know … "for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health."

This is not a picture of Schmidt.
But in an alternate timeline, it could have been.

How about Schmidt himself? Back when he was a boy, he wanted to be a veterinarian when he grew up. Then he went to college and studied physics. (God only knows why!) When that didn't work out, he came home and carried on his father's artistic craft, though he readily acknowledged that he lacked his father's creative brilliance. But he could make the products that people ordered, and that brought in the small amount of money the Schmidts needed to get by. (They have owned the property outright since they bought it, so there's no need to service a mortgage. And once upon a time they had food wandering around in their fields, though that's no longer true.) 

That's when it hit me. Schmidt has half a dozen cats, or more. He is always adopting and taming feral cats when he finds them on the property, or raising kittens if he didn't get one of his own cats spayed in time. He insisted that Ma take on two cats in her house because it was easier than setting mousetraps; but she never had cats until he told her to. He is still the focus of all animal care on the farm, even though they "no longer have animals."

In other words, Schmidt has found a way to make himself into a (quasi-) veterinarian after all! That's what he wanted to do as a boy, and by heaven that's just what he has done. No wonder he always changes the channel to veterinary shows or animal documentaries. They're not boring to him, because he's genuinely interested in what he can learn from them. He said plainly a couple of days ago that one of the episodes of Dr. Pol taught him about a syndrome affecting cats that he now regularly checks for in his own.

So often people abandon their dreams as they grow up. It's remarkable to realize that Schmidt merely adapted his.

But now that makes me wonder. What did Marie want to be, when she was a girl? And has she achieved it? (See, for example, this post here.)

And how would I answer the same question about myself?