Casual
Casual Adult Children of Hobbyists My father now has a hobby. It involves stereo equipment, and I won't bore you with all the details because I don't understand them myself, except for the...
...No collecting of any kind, whether it be stamps, bugs, or kitsch detritus...
...A New Yorker can't easily learn how to make or fix things-carpentry, auto repair, the like-because an apartment has no room for tools, never mind a workbench...
...Thus: No model airplanes...
...But where does this leave me...
...Stereo equipment does fit very nicely into a living room-indeed, my father's rig has taken over the design and layout of the living room, as all the furniture is now skewed in tribute to the two speakers that sit at the far end as tall, proud, and enigmatic as the statues on Easter Island...
...He is, in other words, happy- happier, maybe, than he has ever been...
...Think "Stalinist collective" and you get the idea...
...I am very troubled by this turn of events in his life, and, by extension, my own...
...It's called the "soundstage," and he is the only audience in attendance...
...It seems I can no longer hold fast to the principle that hobbies are the sign of an un-serious person...
...It involves stereo equipment, and I won't bore you with all the details because I don't understand them myself, except for the following points: 1) The stuff costs more than you could possibly imagine, and 2) The astonishing sound his so-called "rig" makes as the "St...
...There's simply too much to read...
...Now he reads magazines about stereos...
...Cars are not accessible, as they are elsewhere in America...
...What is more, I've always been proud of it...
...Indeed, he was the kind of person who made the very idea of a hobby seem trivial...
...I was pursuing my own aesthetic education, pure and simple...
...My sisters knew enough to grow out of the family hostility to hobbies: one gardens, another builds furniture, a third not only does home repairs but even writes a newspaper home-repair column...
...No ham radios...
...We were surely both hampered, my father and I, by our hometown...
...And so I, his only son, grew up hobby-less as well...
...Gardening is an impossibility, especially for an anti-Communist, because the only free tracts of green are communally managed plots wedged between two brownstones (or tenements) where a condemned building once stood...
...Stereo equipment happily requires none of the physical activity other hobbies demand...
...Moviegoing has long been his only outdoor pursuit, and that doesn't exactly count-a hobby should be more active than that...
...First, space...
...Literate people," I would say in my most obnoxious and self-congratulatory moments, "have no use for hobbies...
...He has struck up satisfying friendships with the designers of speakers and the owners of stores...
...We come from the sort of Jewish stock that believes the highest aim in life is to be able to sit in a chair and, two hours later, moan as you rise from said chair as though you have just accompanied Grete Weitz in the Boston Marathon...
...Auto repair involves the use of wrenches and that little dolly you roll around on when you must actually labor underneath the car...
...Now I must accept that they are good, and that everybody should have one...
...I have ever been a voracious consumer of television, Tin Pan Alley songs, and the New York theater, but I refused to have such activity dubbed a "hobby...
...He has given himself almost completely to an essentially frivolous pleasure...
...At some point during carpentry exertions, I understand, one must carry a big piece of wood from point A to point B. My father and I don't go for that kind of thing...
...Second, exercise...
...Matthew's Passion" emerges from it would cause a choir of angels to hang its head...
...Trust my father to come up with an inventive solution to the two worst problems posed by hobbies...
...John Podhoretz...
...This leaves me, the last True Believer, the final Anti-Hobbyist, holding fast to the Old Way like the members of the East German Secret Service who showed up at work every day even after the Stasi was disbanded and its building padlocked shut forever...
...To garden, you must pull out roots from the soil (upper-body strength), do the duck-walk the way they made us in grammar-school phys-ed (lower-body strength), and remain outside in the heat (endurance...
...It's hard for anyone to pursue a hobby in Manhattan...
...But, damn it, I don't want a hobby...
...The truth is, my father has never had a hobby before...
...A New Yorker's car lives in a fearsome nursing home known as a garage, where the monthly housing fee roughly equals a Haitian's per capita annual income...
...His hobby accommodates even this, as the stereo equipment is all pointed for maximum effect toward one large leather chair, in which he and only he sits...
...He has something to talk about besides politics, decadence, the nature of evil, and his grandchildren...
Vol. 1 • September 1995 • No. 1
