At a luncheon meeting with a group of Indian women, I found myself stumped by a polite question about my hobbies. I stood there, my mouth opening and closing like a fool. Just the kind these ladies would not suffer in their midst. It was my first time at one of those gatherings popularly known as "kitty parties". The equivalent of ladies who lunch. Women of leisure who gather to exchange double-edged pleasantries over salad. In this case, it was a lovely spread of Thai curries.
You would think it would be easy to put a simple question about hobbies into simple context. I didn't sew. Or make handbags or jewellery like many of the women there. And I certainly did not have any time to paint (a long-forgotten skill from high school). The last recollection of any hobby I had was briefly collecting interesting looking pieces of stone that I found along the shores of lakes in Ontario's cottage country or at beautiful summer homes along some of Canada's most picturesque lakes. I'd stack them up on my bookshelf and practice putting together a cairn.
I wasn't sure how it would translate, trying to explain my wanderings and collection of two-bit stones because of their unusual shapes or colours. Instead, I settled on the only thing a word like hobby can conjure. I told the patient lady that I used to collect postage stamps as a child. Obviously, she was disappointed. She probably expected something like diamonds, or volunteering for charities. Instead, she got some journalist blundering on about postage stamps.
It led to painful memories. I had the best collection in grade three. When leaving for the mid-term holidays that year, our teachers asked us to build a collection, cultivate a hobby and return with something for show-and-tell. I had been diligently collecting stamps for a while and was only too eager to show them off. By the time I returned to school and showed it to the other girls in my dormitory it was a hit. I would parade it in the evenings, just before the study period began, and we would all go through a couple of countries at a time. They were not stamps bought in packets. These were genuinely stamped stamps, ripped from envelopes and sent by my parents' friends from far and wide.
But it was not to last. The day after I had produced the collection in class, the entire thing disappeared. We searched everywhere, and finally found a few torn pieces, fluttering outside the classroom window - destroyed by one of the boys in a fit of jealousy. My heart was broken and that was the last of my collections. To this day, I wonder if I'll ever feel the same way about dedicating myself to a project again.
