Maine Crime Writers

In 1985, David Halberstam wrote a small lovely book called The Amateurs, chronicling the work and sacrifice of four American Olympic-class scullers. Given the subaqueous profile of their sport, none of these athletes had any prospect of extrinsic reward. Even Olympic medals are not real gold. The achievable end of their physical pain and dedication was exquisitely symbolic. So why did otherwise intelligent and ambitious people endure indifference, ignorance, daily pain, and all the markers of stalled –out personal and professional lives? For love.

Love, to love, amare, is the Latin root of amateur. And doing something for its own sake, not for profit or attention or glory of others, is the mark of a lover. An amateur craves the gift of the activity more than the outcome and the activity is somehow purified by the lack of reward. Amateurs do it, whatever they do, for the love.

I like my work, even the boring and tedious parts, and can lose myself in it with joy, but I’ve never enjoyed publicizing, selling, “branding” myself in the hope of more success. I’d rather spend the time being a writer than an author. Which leads me to suspect I might be an eternal amateur.

I come to the state honestly.

Mark Twain once said: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

From the time I established myself, my work and my passions, as separate from my father’s, I’ve appreciated the truth in that. But knowing how sons push back at what our fathers stand for, I’m surprised to see how much I resemble the man I pushed against so hard when I was a boy.

The year my parents marriage turned fifty, I took my father striped bass fishing off of Cape Cod. I knew he’d been to the Orvis School for fly-casting instruction the year before but I didn’t know how much had taken.

As I feared, watching the fly line whistle back and forth, a weighted Clouser once or twice conking our guide, he hadn’t learned much. But we were deep in a school of bass and I was too busy with my own gear to pay much attention to what was going on aft, except I was aware of the flailing and some mild curses, his, not the guide’s.

“Ha!” I heard finally and turned to look.

Terry, the guide, was helping him gingerly unhook a toothy but very small bluefish.

“Got the little bastard.”

“Emphasis on the little,” I jabbed.

But the beatific smile beneath his hat was enough to warm the cold windy ride back to Plymouth. He’d come to his fishing day without expectation of reward and been pleased. And that day I learned that being an eternal amateur was an honorable legacy, that not having to be an expert at everything meant not needing more and bigger successes every time.

If amateurism is rooted in love, it also springs from a passionate curiosity. One of my best friends built a national consulting business around athletic shoes: manufacture, styles and trends, financial and corporate analyses of the companies that make and sell them. It’s a serious business, even if it doesn’t sound like one – he’s been called the Sneaker King – and he’s the preeminent expert in his niche. He traveled a lot, found the work consuming and interesting, and it made him plenty of money.

So why, on Thursday afternoons, does he drive to a rickety white house on the edge of a university campus and broadcast a volunteer radio show presenting funk music? Passion – he may be an amateur in  the music and the radio ‘businesses,’ but he’s passionate about the music, curious about its history, its players, development.

I bring all this up because at eighty-six my father, the erstwhile fisherman, taught himself American Sign Language. For no particular reason – he didn’t want to stand up in front of his church and translate the service for members of his congregation. He hadn’t made new friends who were deaf. He wasn’t simply keeping himself busy: he had water aerobics, the food committee, the woodshop. He was doing it for the best of all reasons – he got curious about it.

As anyone who’s lived to eighty-six knows, curiosity doesn’t kill any cats – if anything, it feeds them. If anything, it’s certainty that kills things.

As a society, we revere specialty. We respect what appears to be a deep expertise in almost anything: business, financial, athletic, even romantic. But that kind of monomania requires certainty – you must always know you are on the right path, that nothing outside the path is interesting or can contribute to achieving your goals.

Curiosity is the dead opposite of certainty. It is the acknowledgement there are things we don’t already know that might be important, useful, or even just interesting. Curiosity is fed by that attitude of perpetual amateurism: what happens if I do it this way? Why is this like that? Why do we have to think this way?

Certainty takes things and people for granted. Curiosity is the daughter of doubt. We could use a little doubt, a little less certainty we know everything we need to know.

There is, after all, only one important certainty, that we die. When and what happens after, who knows? And who cares, really? And this thing we should be so certain of is the one thing we pretend will not happen to us. That itself is a strong enough argument against too much certainty.

So if we’re uncertain about what we ought to be certain of, maybe we also show too much certainty around things we cannot or should not pretend are knowable: relationships, politics, religion.

A politician is always a fat dumb easy target, but most politics is nothing more than certainty carried to a ridiculous degree, when even an individual’s positions can become mutually exclusive. Our politicians are certain evolution is a hoax, that old white men know best what women should do with their bodies, that homosexuality is an abomination (unless their son or daughter comes out).

All this certainty makes me yearn for a citizen legislature again, underpaid, supported by its own work outside the body. As messy and inefficient as it is – and I’ve seen the New Hampshire one at work, so I know – can our current governing bodies claim more success? Maybe amateurism can return some joy to the process – letting people with passion serve, the curious, the open-minded. Let’s bring back that perpetual amateur: in love with the work for its own sake, the process and the product, competent without being narrow, curious for what he or she knows and, most especially, does not.