The bright yellow paint coating the concrete still holds the heat of the sun after dinner, but the backs of my legs aren’t burning when I boost myself up. In my version of this memory, a cousin sits next to me. We are in the park, straddling the largest of the multi-colored construction pipes that have been re-purposed as playground equipment, chattering the way girls do when they are 10 and 11 on warm summer nights. Out of the blue, I am seized by an inspiration. The idea is fantastic, and too exciting to keep to myself. I lean towards her and whisper in her ear, “Know what? When I grow up, I’m going to be President of the United States.”

My cousin probably laughed at me, though not unkindly. She tolerated my grand impulses better than anyone else I knew. She didn’t try to talk me out of any of them, either.

In the mid-1960s, when this notion first occurred to me, I wasn’t aware of the obstacles  between me and my private goal. In those days, the weekly newspaper still divided wants ads between jobs for men and jobs for women. All females had to cover their heads in church. My mother wouldn’t learn to drive for another decade. I wasn’t even allowed to wear blue jeans. A few years later, I traded in my presidential hopes for a goal that might be attainable. I told my parents I wanted to be a lawyer someday. They encouraged me to become a legal secretary instead. That’s what smart girls did. We chose a profession that interested us, and went to work for a man in that field. If I was lucky, they told me, maybe I would marry a lawyer.

At 19, armed with an Associates’ Degree in Applied Sciences, I went to work as a legal secretary in the best firm in my hometown. After a year, the young lawyer to whom I had been assigned told me I was on the wrong side of the desk. “You could do this work if you went back to school,” he said. I never forgot his encouragement. Eventually, I followed his advice, finished college and attended law school. When I graduated in 1984, I was hired as the first woman in the Regional Counsel’s office of a federal agency. The cousin with whom I shared my childhood fantasy followed a similar roundabout path to become a scientist. That’s how change happened for many women of our generation, in small increments, if we wanted something badly enough. Of course, it helped if someone believed in us until we began to believe in ourselves.

My heart swells whenever I remember the future I imagined on that July evening. A half-century later, someone has finally brought that vision with reach. Hillary Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. No one can predict the outcome of the convention or the general election; there are still a number of unknowns and many who are not inspired by her accomplishment. I am savoring this moment anyway. My secret ambition is now a real possibility to which any American girl can aspire. History made, indeed.