Passion: A Study in Contrast?

After I taught class today, I went to check my email in the dinky little adjunct office. An older man I'd seen in there once before was there again. Being in such a small space together and not at least greeting one another would be very awkward. I asked him, in my cheesy I-don't-know-what-else-to-say way: "Is it the weekend yet?"

He's got some hearing loss and thought I'd asked him how his weekend was. I got to hear all about his trip to San Francisco for an opera performance, and how the trip back was very complicated because of some bomb threats at the Oakland airport. He said hundreds and hundreds of people were standing outside the terminal in the baking sun, having been evacuated.

We started talking, and I asked him where he taught before he came to the community college. "How much time do you have?" he asked. I said "Plenty." He gave me a 10-minute history of his life. High school drop out. Went back to college. Got multiple degrees. He's taught at big universities all over the midwest and east coast, thoroughly enjoyed picking up and moving to the next job for better money and more adventure. His field was mainly comparative literature, but he also taught French and Spanish. For five years he worked as a hospice caregiver in Scottsdale, then long after retirement, picked up teaching again as an adjunct.

His main passion through his whole life, he says, has been the opera. While working in New York City he once flew to Venice for a weekend, for a single opera performance, then right back home. While living in Africa (I didn't get to hear about that adventure) he flew to New York City for the same reason. Then immediately back a day later. Opera has provided the vivid colors in his life, year after year after year. It has been not only a passion, but a consuming one and listening to him talk about it kept me happily locked into the moment as though he were a campfire I was staring into.

He looks like a man in his late 60s, around the same age as the toothless South Carolinian with the chihuahua and the "issues." However, the opera guy told me he's coming up on his 83rd birthday. Is it his great love for opera, or for anything, that has kept him "young?" That has to have something to do with it, right?

And now he's teaching beginning Spanish to community college students who probably don't appreciate him much, but I don't think that matters to him. There was a sense that he knows he's lived his life exactly the way he's wanted to, and dipped the wooden bucket deeply into the well of what inspires him.

I couldn't help wondering how things would go if he were trapped in an elevator with the guy from the Booth o' Knives. Both are passionate men. One loves "Carmen" and world travel and academia; the other loves helpless, abused miniature dogs and racial slurs and knives. What would they talk about? Would they despise each other or find common ground?