My father has no hobbies. Not a single one. He used to play a bit of golf, but that effort only produced two lasting memories. There was the un-witnessed hole-in-one at George Williams that must have occurred sometime during the early 1980s. That feat fell on absent eyes and deaf ears, but the only other enduring event was a lasting phrase that my brother and I can both hear to this day. It was a pleasant afternoon on Lawsonia Golf Course, north near that Green Lake. My father was struggling, as is his golfing habit, and after ripping multiple drives into multiple directions, he swung his club in frustration and uttered the famous phrase, “I can do this”. It was more a plea, half a beg, tinged with both immediate desperation and long enduring golfing despair. We had witnessed the death of his golf game, and while we played many times since then, we have never played without someone telling the others that he could, indeed, do this.
He used to sit on his pier, often. In fact, when I was a child, before the advent of cellular telephones and even cordless ones, he ran a telephone line from his house to his pier, so that he could sit there and conduct business. It was a strong effort, and I suppose that was no different than today, when I sit on a boat in the middle of the lake, iPad and similarly branded phone sitting on the bow cushions at the ready, assuming I’m motivated enough to pick up the phone when it rings. The desire to do work from a place other than an office has always been strong, as evidenced by the 100′ of telephone cable that attached my father’s pier to his house. Even those pier sitting days are limited now. He boats some, sails a little more, and he looks over a collection of shiny red automobiles routinely, though all of these are diminishing. My father is not dying, but his love of hobby is a goner.
It’s because he has no hobbies that he knows not how to rest. Naps are not rest. I struggle from the exact opposite affliction. I cannot nap to save my life. This nap phobia stems from my childhood, when my parents forced me to take an afternoon nap. We didn’t have to do this at home, but on vacation, when the church camp had morning and evening activities for kids, we had to nap. We were on vacation, and we had to spend some amount of time hidden from the afternoon sun, huddled in our rented bedrooms. It was a cruel punishment, as few things are worse than spending time in a dark bedroom while hearing the squeals and laughter of the kids whose parents didn’t subscribe to this primitive form of torture. Because of that, I cannot nap now, and my parents have stolen the supposed joy that is a nap, cat or otherwise.
The childhood scars aside, the real reason I cannot nap is because I have so many other things I wish to do at any given time. I have work to do, sure, but I am not a spaz Realtor, beholden to working at every waking second. To quote David Burge, “Follow your passion”? Bulls@%t. Find something you’re good at and that other people value. Use the resulting income to pay for your passion”. I work to afford a tenacious pursuit of hobby, and that pursuit will ultimately be my professional undoing. Can you blame me? I live here, in this land where every hobby ever worth pursuing is available to me on a daily, hourly, basis.
Monday, I had a tick bite me. This was the first tick of 2014, but it will not be the last. I have flicked as many as 10 ticks off of me at one time, and while I have never been diagnosed with Lyme’s Disease I have also never been diagnosed with ADHD. Morel hunting and ticks go hand in hand, not happily, like a couple skipping through a field, but instead angrily and necessarily, because climbing through brush and sliding under brambles is a requirement of the great coming hunt. I hated that tick on Monday, and I cursed it for biting me, but it was not entirely unwelcome. You know when ticks don’t bite you? In January. You know where they won’t bite you in April? Inside an office building. It’s spring, and I’m nothing if not an outdoors-man of a soft sort, and so a tick bite is a rite of passage, a signal that I have made it from winter and into spring, which is where I spent the last six months hoping to end up.
We all know that spring is simply a necessary transition from that place where we didn’t want to go to the place where we hope to be. Without spring, we’d shovel one day and boat the next, and that sounds somewhat appealing but would be, in practice, absolutely disorienting. When the summer does come, after Morel Season and before Boating Season, we will have so many hobbies at our disposal. There is swimming and sailing, boating and fishing, shore path walking and town shopping. There is morning golf and afternoon tennis, and sometimes there is morning tennis and afternoon golf. There is ice cream licking and firework watching. There is lazy breakfast making and sunny Saturday sunning. There is early morning fishing and earlier morning skiing. There is evening boating to evening dining, and there are slow cruises home, through that inky dark water and under that bright starred sky.
There are hobbies to indulge in, and the time is coming. The lake and sun are working overtime to rid us of this icy blanket (prediction- ice will be out by Sunday evening), and the season of The Hobby has nearly arrived. I don’t doubt that you can have hobbies in the city. It’s just that those hobbies are sort of lame, and they are boring. If you disagree, spend one Saturday on the flesh blanket that is a Chicago beach, and spend the next Saturday lounging on a white pier that juts out into this deep blue lake. Vacation homes are fun, yes, and the appliances matter and so does the material of the floor. But more than shelter a vacation home is really just a launching point for all those hobbies that you’ve yet found time to practice.