“So, what’s your passion?” Tony asks peering above the tops of the gold wireframes he wears when he’s tweaking SQL queries.
By day, Tony is a hardworking data analyst meticulously poring over columns of enrollment figures at the local university. At night and on weekends, he’s transformed. He becomes a wedding photographer, and that’s not the only time he whips out his super power. Tony is good at asking questions.
I imagine him at a post-nuptials reception, champagne fountain bubbling, polka band hopping while three aunts, the flower girl and the ring bearer kick out the chicken dance. He strides up to the prettiest bride’s maid where she stands at the hors devours table selecting just one bacon roll on a toothpick, sneaking it when she thinks no one is looking.
“So, what’s your passion?” Tony asks.
And she smiles, mouth closed, head slightly cocked.
Snap. It’s another perfect candid for the memories consultant to paste in the album alongside a note the groom has scribbled on a napkin. She begins to tell him that she is in school studying physical therapy, and she loves pediatrics because it’s so fun and rewarding to see toddlers go from barely being able to stand to walking on their own.
He listens, because the shot was worth the price, and he is, in fact, that nice.
I don’t pause when he asks me the question, because the answer is as obvious as a bride’s gown is white. “Two little boys.”
“Good answer,” he laughs and asks, “But what’s your passion outside of family and work?”
I never answer the question, but what he’s slowly discovering is that my super power is palaver. I’m not likely to leave his cube or shut up until I hear the Pac-Man ring of my mobile phone in the next cube over.
He should probably have it on speed-dial, so he can phone me when I get on a roll, and then hang up just as he hears me round the corner and pick up. Click.
I am good at bullshit.
I am merciless, delivering a discourse on 80s-punk-rock-inspired socio-political philosophy, the kind of thing you’re only likely to grok if you began your teens in southern Wisconsin at about the same time Reagan delivered his infamous one-liner, “We start bombing in five minutes.” It’s the slightly pathetic ramblings of an aging progressive who still listens to Husker Du on vinyl, pines after the days of legendary Fighting Bob La Follette, and laments the loss Paul Wellstone and his green campaign bus, the greatest hope for forward-thinking midwesterners in contemporary times.
The conversation wanders, covering everything from our hopes for retirement, to socialized medicine, to conspicuous consumption, and the projects to which we’re assigned. I avoid passion, but the question lingers.
At night, the foxy and clever Jennifer and I watch a Frank Gehry documentary on PBS. I am a huge fan, and when Jennifer recently found herself in Prague, I insisted she make a side trip to see the Dancing House and to take a picture, or several pictures, for me.
I watch through the lens of the question about passion. I wonder about the passion and courage it must have taken for Gehry to begin taking the architectural risks he made early in his career. Gehry might have chosen to design McMansions in the suburbs. That would have been the safe thing to do. He had a family to support after all. Instead, he designed the Guggenheim in Bilbao.
I consider my own professional life. I have, among other ways I’ve filled my time, written software user manuals, though I’ve not done so for years. It occurs to me just how much writing manuals is like building McMansions. One does it because it is safe and pays the bills, but I imagine that more than a few technical writers out there are secretly novelists who’d be better off working on their own literary Bilbaos.
I like writing, but I am not certain I am one of these clandestine novelists. I just believe they’re out there, like a conspiracy nut believes the government is hiding evidence of extraterrestrial life. I’m not at all sure about passion for myself. There world is too big and too marvelous to choose.
I love my kids, running through the park, walking through the woods, and drinking a strong cup of coffee. That’s good enough.