Enthusiasms

Yesterday morning, before church, I sat down and sort of flipped around on the television. So many of the channels either had infomercials (bleah) or were running news footage that seemed (as it so often does) to just be a litany of the bad stuff people do to other people. So I kept flipping, feeling kind of down - one of the channels, there were like three stories within 3 minutes that basically showed the suckier side of human nature.

Then I hit PBS. They were running a show on trains. Specifically, on old steam trains that train-buffs keep running. Some of the trains have short, dedicated routes; some of them use track belonging to freight companies that they get permission to use. The program talked about how the guys (mostly guys) who are interested in trains work to restore them- how a lot of the trains had been rescued from scrapyards - and how the train people spend their free time keeping the trains running.

That kind of thing makes me extremely happy. I need to see stuff like that as an antidote to the "People are getting killed in riots in Kenya; there might be a serial killer on the loose in Florida; homes are being foreclosed at record rates" stories. The barrage of bad news.

Part of it is also that when I was a kid, my dad was kind of interested in trains. Oh, not enough (and he didn't have the time) to actually go out and try to buy a caboose or an old steam locomotive or anything - the most we had were HO scale trains in the basement - but some weekends we'd get together with a couple other families and make a trip somewhere where there was an old steam line, and we'd take a ride on the trains. So as a young kid I kind of knew what the old steam trains were like. I remember winding through the forests of Pennsylvania on one such trip.

I love anything, though, where a person has a passion - a deep and abiding love of something - and they follow that. Especially if the passion isn't something particularly "practical," in the sense that the person will never get rich or famous off of it. (Yes, maybe it's snobby of me, but I tend to see the kind of impractical passions as somehow purer). The old steam train buffs are like that - no one is going to give them millions and millions of dollars to do what they do; no Hollywood producer is going to want to make blockbuster movies about them. But they don't care, because they enjoy what they do.

It also makes me happy from the "preserving history" standpoint. My main interest in history revolves around "how did people live?" - what were their houses like, what did they wear, how did they get from place to place, what did they do for fun. Being able to get on an old steam train, although it might never be a 100% recreation of the past, still gives you sort of an idea of what it was like.

And I just find people with a deep and abiding interest in something, especially something that seems kind of obscure, interesting - how did they get into it? What is it about that thing that keeps them so fascinated?

(One of the women who was married to a train fanatic, made the comment, "I get to go on a date with my husband and help drive a steam train at the same time. No other woman in America, I bet, gets to say that." hahahahaha.)

I remember this summer I was at an art festival and I saw a group of people who did clog-dancing. Now, I know boo about clog dancing other than that it reminds me a little bit of Irish step-dancing, it looks very challenging to do, but it looks like it would be fun once you were good at it (and were in sufficiently good shape!). The leader of the group talked a little between each set and described how his group would go to conventions (they have clog-dancing conventions. That makes me smile) and how they'd trade routines with other groups, how people would track down sources of traditional music - all that stuff. And it made me extremely happy - there's this whole secret "underground" world of clog-dancing that I know nothing about, but that there are people who are fascinated by it and want to do it and want to learn about it and want to share it.

It's kind of like a secret identity, I guess - that this ordinary-looking woman behind a desk somewhere has this whole secret life where she knows jigs and reels and wears shoes with taps on them. The idea that everyone is interesting, everyone has something cool about them, if you just take the time to pay attention.

There's also a dulcimer festival a couple towns over once a year. I've never gone - it always seems to fall on a weekend when I have other obligations, and I don't know, as a "muggle" in the dulcimer-world, how openly I'd be welcomed, but it makes me happy that there are people out there keeping that alive.

I also love the shows they do on Food Network about the barbecue fanatics - that there are people out there that do this serious scholarly study of 'cue and how it's made and what the differences between the four types (Carolinas, Memphis, Texas, and Kansas City) are and what the historic recipes are. And they actually argue about what's the best wood for smoking, or whether the meat should have sauce or not.

I think I love all those things for a couple of reasons. First, when I'm enthusiastic about something, I'm enthusiastic about it, and I don't really care whether it's "cool" or not. So it makes me feel happy (and maybe a little less weird) to see that there are other people out there who feel the same way about their particular interest. (And I have to admit, in recent years, because I've been so busy, some of my passions have gone on the back burner, and that makes me sad. And it makes me feel like a little bit of me is slipping away - like, "What is happening to that girl who used to be able to name almost any doo-wop band correctly on the basis of hearing a few notes of one of their songs?" or "How much do I remember any more about the marks of the different doll-makers of the past century?" Stuff I used to be really really into, used to actually STUDY because I had the time).

Second, I often see just the "surface" of people - people I work with, people in my classes. And sometimes that "surface" has kind of a glaze on it - like, you get the feeling, "This person isn't interested." And you begin to wonder, "Are they interested in ANYTHING?" And while I suppose there are people who have either taken the "cool" stance to the extreme that they don't care about anything, or people who are truly so uninterested in stuff that they really have nothing they're passionate about, I bet those people are rare. So seeing people working at what they love reminds me that even if my students don't LOVE biology, they probably have something somewhere they LOVE.

And finally - somehow, I think in some kind of weird mystical/spiritual way, the people who have those deep and abiding passions, who want steam trains to continue to run, who want to preserve traditional forms of music, who care deeply about a particular skill and want to pass it on, they're good for the world. They somehow make it a more interesting and deeper place. And they remind others that what you do to earn your bread - or the titles after your name - are not the sum total of who you are.