On Father's Day

A friend posted this on her FB page:

My father's passions included baseball (watching), tennis (playing), photography (taking), and Broadway musicals (attending). Of those, I inherited only the Broadway gene. How about you? Any of your father's interests that you have, too?

And I find myself thinking...I have no idea what my father was passionate about.  As a boy, he became an Eagle Scout--but never talked about it to his kids, never suggested that we get into scouts.  He finished second in the Indianapolis Parks tennis tournament one year...but never (to my knowledge) played tennis as an adult (although my younger brother did).

When I was a kid, he got involved with the YMCA "Indian Guides" program, even helping people get "tribes" started, and especially in the African-American community.  But I don't remember his doing anything with it after I was 10 or 12 (say, 1960 or later).

He did not like to travel; he did not care for theater (or television); he had no particular interest in music (although Mom did--she started college as a music major, and played piano throughout her life).  He read mysteries, but never talked about them.  He tracked his investment portfolio (manually), but never talked about it.

He had no hobbies that I can remember.  He played golf for a while in the early 1960s, but stopped (the club we belonged to was purchased to build an interstate highway, and he never joined another, never played much on public courses); by the mid-'60s, he was working such long hours, and often through the weekend, that he had neither time nor energy, even if he had had the inclination.  He was not a "joiner" (he did not, for example, become a member of the American Legion or the Veterans of Foreign Wars, although he could have).  He knew how to play bridge, but didn't play much either socially or at all competitively.  He played some poker, but I wouldn't say it was a passion.  He liked baseball, but never much went to baseball games.  (I grew up in Indianapolis, and we went to maybe a half a dozen games that I can remember in the late 1950s, early 1960s; we went to one game in Chicago, as a part of a trip to see some friends of my parents who had mover there; he went to one or two Cincinnati Reds games a year after he retired...didn't watch baseball on TV).  He and Mom went to horse races in Cincinnati and Louisville in the late 1970s and 1980s, but not all that often, once or twice a year.

I could go on, but it seems pointless.