The summer he was 11 my brother was obsessed with baseball. He’d rush through breakfast, grab his mitt, hop on his bike, and pedal over to the ball field. Boys from all over town gathered there every morning to play ball on teams of their own devising. Not an adult was in sight. They quit for lunch, and come home to the Campbell soup and bologna sandwich every child ate in those days. Bill’s passion for playing ball kind of petered out by the time he was thirteen or fourteen, as most of the other boys grew taller and stronger, while he, like our father, stayed a “shrimp” until his junior year in high school. It just wasn’t as much fun, he told us. So instead of pedaling furiously over to the ball field, he became a passionate fan of the Chicago Cubs, or, on the days they weren’t on television, of the White Sox.

         For several years, holed up in the family TV room over our garage, he kept incredibly detailed records of every hit, walk, strikeout and error of every single game. The room had an air conditioner in one window, and with the shades pulled, Bill sat, surrounded by his various books of handwritten statistics, shut away from summer. This went on until one day our mother had “had it”; she marched in, turned off the television, and told him to go stuff envelopes for Chuck Percy. Charles Percy, a local businessman, was running for governor that summer, 1964. His campaign headquarters was on the other side of town, an easy bike ride from our house. So Bill, reluctantly I’m sure, went over to the office and volunteered.

         By the end of that summer he was head of Teens for Percy, and was flying all over Illinois with the candidate, to all the downstate county fairs (in Illinois if it’s not in Cook County it’s “downstate”), organizing other young volunteers, and I don’t know what all else. I was a pretty rotten big sister at that time, not really paying much attention to my little brother and his doings. But looking back on that summer it’s pretty clear what had happened. He’d outgrown one passion, trading it in for another – politics. And in fact, politics turned out to be Bill’s lifelong passion, his career even, which isn’t always the case with passions.

         I’ve been thinking a lot lately about people’s passions, how some have them and some don’t. Many do go back to childhood, as with my brother. I read somewhere once that childhood enthusiasms often point the way to fulfilling adult experiences. What did you want to be when you were 11 or 12? What did you love doing most? Unfortunately, puberty often interrupts our train of thought, both for boys and for girls, filling our heads and hearts with different passions. When we finally emerge on the other side of all that hormonal activity, it’s time to earn a living, and we take what’s offered, those childish dreams forgotten.

         My neighbor, Jane Bernier, took me through her sewing room the other day with its bins of colorful fabrics, lace, Goodwill finds (old clothes chosen for their interesting fabrics), buttons, and trims. “I’ve always loved fabric,” she told me. “Fabric was on my Christmas list from the time I was nine. Never got any, but it was always on my list.” She was 6 when she got her first sewing machine, an old Singer. She saved her money (including rolls of pennies) and bought herself a brand new Singer Featherweight when she was 12, a machine she still sews on.

         Boys used to love tinkering with cars; Rosey Gerry’s car obsession started when he was 8 and got his first car, a ’49 Buick. And drove it. As he puts it, “I got my ass warmed more than once for driving down Thurlow Road to the corner and back.” Watch him talk about his car collection in a WABI-TV interview this summer.

         I designed and tried to build a glass-topped coffee table when I was about 12. I say tried, because I had no power tools, (nor of course the skill to use them if I did), nor any woodworking skills at all. But I remember getting the wood somewhere and thinking a lot about just how I’d do it. Today, if I still actually wanted such a table, I could do it easily. Working with wood, building things, has been a continuing thread through my adult life.

          Take John Bunker, the apple guy of Palermo and MOFGA. I don’t know if apples figured in his childhood, but John has single-mindedly pursued the discovery of old apple varieties for much of his adult life. If you go the Common Ground Fair at the end of this month, check out the Heritage Orchard that’s being developed there, including dozens and dozens of nearly extinct apple varieties. One you’re likely to see is the Fletcher Sweet, identified by the late Clarence Thurlow on High Street in Lincolnville several years ago. John climbed that tall tree and snipped off enough live twigs to be scion wood for a new generation of Fletcher Sweets. Several were sold in town in succeeding years; mine has a nice crop on it this summer.

         I think of local friends who pursue interests with such delight –  Randy Harvey’s granite quarry and the paths it’s taken him; Tom Crowley filtering experience through his poems; Simone van der Ven’s expressive pottery; Hanji Chang’s creative cooking; Dan Dufault’s love of flying and aircraft; Corelyn Senn’s fascination with historical mysteries.

            Where does the enthusiasm gene come from? Or is it a gene? Nature or nurture? As an adopted person, I’ve kicked that around all my life. When I finally met birth relatives – second cousins, as it turned out, but still a thrill – I studied their faces, looking for my own features, to no avail. “Your noses are too big,” I told them. Then we visited a woman cousin, Jeanette. She opened the door, and I looked into my own face. She was a rag weaver, a chair caner, and a local history buff.  A good description of me.

            But I’m not convinced it’s all “nature”; a lot of our passion comes from intention. We can develop skills, learn new information, even change our thought patterns. I started writing when I was 30 (not counting the three chapters of a novel I pecked out on an old typewriter when I was 9) and had to learn to be more observant, a skill like any other. Maybe that’s the most important skill of all, paying attention to the details, looking at the world around us.

A piece by Abigail Curtis in this week-end’s Bangor Daily News about Steve Alsup, a Maine blacksmith, had this comment, referring to an online photo essay of the blacksmith’s life:

            Lincolnville’s firemen have been much busier than usual this past month, from the tragedy of the fire that took the lives of Gene and Virginia Dyer to the dramatic boat fire in Lincolnville Harbor to the gas line explosion Sunday on Calderwood Lane which left Kergan Thomann with serious burns. Any one of these events must take a lot out of the men who are having to deal with them, the physical exertion, the danger, and the emotional toll. Three such events in just a couple of weeks is a lot, the kind of thing most of us never see. Here’s hoping for a complete recovery for Kergan...

‘A Third of the Town’

            That’s about how many people attended the memorial for Virginia and Gene Dyer on Sunday at Point Lookout. Deepest sympathy to all on the tragic loss of this couple, lifelong Lincolnville residents.