Don’t ask me why, but I have been thinking whether I had any real hobbies when I was a kid. I pretended to be a doctor when I was around eleven, but got bored before risking any malpractice. Now, you have to keep in mind this was during the Fifties, so don’t be thinking about Fortnite or anything remotely close to it. I was very lucky and got to hang out with the engineer boots and big buckle crowd, along with the kids who wore their pants chest high and had slide rules falling out of their baggy pants. I’m not sure if the tough guys had hobbies, while they’d probably think handball qualifies, which it does not.
I think some of my smart friends saved shit like stamps or coins. Did you know that everything you can possibly think of has a following well in place? I don’t care what it is. Think of anything and then look it up and you will find a multitude of groups immersed in whatever the hell you can possibly imagine. Every automobile ever manufactured has at least one club devoted to the absolute integrity of that vehicle.
I didn’t get off on this hobby thing for no reason, because my brain doesn’t work that way. I actually started thinking about this whole hobby business, because of writing. I don’t know what you think about doing, simply because you enjoy it, which I think qualifies as a hobby. When I was a kid, hobbies meant things like model airplanes and their fantastic glue or coins or stamps or baseball cards. Grown ups did things like Revolutionary War re-enactments, line dancing, a tool collection to rival Sears, collecting doll houses or reading groups or anything you could possibly think of.
Ever since I started writing to my grandson well over seven years ago, I seem to have this new hobby and I am still not used to it at all. For the past few days, I’ve been thinking I ought to write something to you, which is very fucked up. I actually think there are some people, admittedly an extremely modest number, who actually enjoy my writing. Just for the record, I want you to know that I am shocked with any compliment. I try to genuinely share what’s going on and I have been speechlessly blessed with priceless exchanges. I wouldn’t dare say another word about that stuff.
This thing I do, we all have in common. Trust me, I don’t do this stuff because I think I am any good at it, an idea that could never work for me. It’s these moments we have to ourselves and there are an infinite number every day. I don’t know what the rest of you do, but I have begun to look for more ways to share with writing.
The older I got, the more I wanted to share this conversation I’ve been having with myself for as long as I can remember. After all these years, I am still completely unsure of what other people do. Let’s say you’ve just left Costco and picked up whatever you needed. You are pushing the cart back to your car and what are you thinking? My guess is it could be about absolutely anything imaginable. I think I’m right that all of us carry on these mind musings all the time, some more than others.
This is what I love to share with you. The farther I get away from the small me and start plopping platitudes, the faster i come running back to what I’ve experienced and learned over time. I know for sure that really getting older has rocked my world in ways I never could have imagined only a handful of years ago. You know, if you’ve been putting something off until you felt the time was right, you will more than likely croak before you get to it and that’s a strangely, uncomfortable reality and a potential motivator as well.
The reality of my chronology got me into this hobby. I have a little grandson and when he gets into his mid-seventies like me, I want us to have this very private conversation between our two hearts, reading these words together. It’s the gift of life and I figured out a while ago, it was all I owned. I wanted to start sharing that idea and now you’ve also gotten into the act.
It was a magnificently elegant weekday afternoon and I caught myself thinking about a story that was on my mind. I started thinking, what kind of an idiot would want to spend a magnificent Kauai afternoon sitting at his desk and typing some story about why writing is his hobby? In the midst of a very brief internal debate at that moment, I put on the old man smile and accepted how much it means to me to be able to spend this time with you. Thank you.