Passion Plays : Sky-diving. Taming roller coasters. Conducting. Nurturing bonsai. What started as hobbies now feed the soul.
Passions are more than hobbies, more than something to do on a Saturday afternoon. They do not need to change the world, although sometimes they do. They need only to be a part of it, a part of us.
John Espinosa’s passion for sky-diving led him to a better place, where race and wealth don’t matter. He’s found that all people are pretty much the same the first time they strap parachutes on their backs and contemplate the ground below.
Dr. Lisa Scheinen’s work in the county morgue takes her to a side of life not many of us see, a place of violence and death. Her passion, on the other hand, takes her all over the world to more peaceful settings, where cotton candy and laughter prevail. Roller coasters clear her mind and free her spirit.
Dr. Ivan Shulman knows that a person’s health is a matter of both body and soul. With surgical instruments he saves lives; with a maestro’s baton, he lifts spirits.
And for Ed Partis, the vision to see beauty in all living things came through a love for bonsai. At 69, his life is full, but he wonders what will become of his beloved trees when he is gone. Our passions can also bring pain.
We do not choose our passions as much as we discover them. These four people--a truck driver, a forensic pathologist, a surgeon and a retiree--have found passions that bring balance to their lives, centers of gravity to hold them steady, wind and sail to set them free.
JOHN ESPINOSA
‘It’s the Closest That Man Will Ever Come to Flying’
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John Espinosa thinks about the things in life that didn’t work out, about the anger he felt as a young man--so much of it that there seemed room for nothing else.
He wanted to be a boxer, a hometown champ whom people would cheer. In the gym he could lash out, he could fight back at a racist world that repeatedly threw walls in front of him.
Fighting is what he remembers most about his childhood. Not all of it was in the ring. “I used to start fights with white kids,” he says. “I was getting back. I hate myself for that now that I’m older. I hate myself for that.”
Espinosa, 55, quit school in the 10th grade, lying about his age (he was 16) to join the Army. It was there that he first jumped out of an airplane.
Nearly 1,100 jumps later, he still feels the thrill of the dive, moving toward the ground at 120 m.p.h. from 12,000 feet.
“It’s the closest that man will ever come to flying,” he says. Espinosa is a grandfather now. “It makes me feel good, like I still got a little bit in me.”
As he grew older, his goals became more modest. He wanted to be an ironworker, a draftsman, a social worker, a teacher. He never wanted to be a truck driver.
When he left the military in 1957, he returned to Los Angeles and had trouble finding work. “In them days, jobs were scarce,” says Espinosa, who now lives in Norwalk. “You had discrimination. . . . Jobs have a lot to do with making and breaking people. If you have no job, you have no money, nothing.”
He has been driving trucks, off and on, since 1964. In 1970, he started sky-diving again, and that’s when it became an important part of his life.
“To me, it’s awesome. That’s the only word I can come up with. Some people say it’s a rush. I can’t describe it as a rush. Awesome, free. You can breathe, like taking a deep breath and feeling good, like laying down on a bed of air.”
In 1978, he became jump master for a group called the Aztec Flyers, and that is when his passion led to important realizations about himself and others.
He began offering instructions and overseeing students’ jumps. One of the beauties he saw in the sport had nothing to do with technique but with fear.
“I met a lot of prominent people. I jump-mastered doctors, lawyers, professionals. They get scared too. They make mistakes too. You’re used to seeing these people as something special, but when you see them sky-diving, they react like everybody else. Up there, everyone’s equal.”
LISA SCHEINEN
‘It Kind of Takes Me Back to Being a Kid Again’
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In her office, Dr. Lisa Scheinen surrounds herself with reminders of the good things in life, people and places she loves, times she has learned never to take for granted.
It is one of many lessons taught to her as a forensic pathologist for the L.A. County coroner’s office. By examining death, Scheinen has learned verses in life.
“Every day, you see the seamy underside of life, you see all the results of the gangbangers and also the innocent people who are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You realize it could happen to you, so you might as well enjoy what you got for as long as you can.”
So she looks at the photographs a lot. There’s one of her with her mother and grandmother taken the day Scheinen graduated from medical school, one of her and her husband on their wedding day eight years ago.
And there are two pictures of the Coney Island Cyclone.
For Scheinen, 41, enjoying life means packing as many roller coaster rides as a person can fit into a lifetime. It is a means of purging and renewing.
“I have to think all the time at work,” she says. “I don’t want to come home and play chess. I want to do something where I can just relax.”
A couple of figures stand out in Scheinen’s life:
* Last year, she performed 293 autopsies. (This is down from 359 in 1992, but only because she is spending more time testifying in court.)
* At last count, she has ridden 310 roller coasters in 115 amusement parks in 12 countries. (She once rode the Mind Bender, a triple-looping steel coaster in Georgia, 52 times in one day.)
“I love the whole feel of the park,” she says. “It’s a safe thrill. There’s the illusion of danger, but you know nothing’s going to happen. It kind of takes me back to being a kid again.
“My job is kind of high pressure, and it’s a nice counterpoint to be on the coasters because it’s a chance where you can kind of put your brain in neutral and say, ‘Hey, I don’t have to think today, I’m just going to have a good time.’ ”
After taking her board exams in 1991 in San Diego (“three days of living hell”), she immediately drove to the nearby Giant Dipper and rode it five times to clear her head.
“It always works,” she says. “I always feel satisfied when I leave. I feel like I did what I came to do.”
Scheinen also is editor of RollerCoaster! magazine, published by the American Coaster Enthusiasts.
The rides, like her work, never get boring.
“We see some really mutilated things here, and I’ve kind of gotten over that, but there are still cases where you just look and say, ‘How can somebody do this to another human being?’ ”
Those are the moments when she faces her wall, sees people and places she loves, feels the wind of the Cyclone in her face. It is then that her passion is easily defined.
“It makes me feel alive.”
IVAN SHULMAN
‘You Just Don’t Accept the Notion That It’s Going to Fail’
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It wasn’t a matter of choosing medicine over music, it was a matter of finding a way to have both in his life.
“My father told me that if you have your medicine, you can have your music, not necessarily the other way around,” says Dr. Ivan Shulman, a general surgeon with the Southern California Permanente Medical Group in West Los Angeles.
Shulman, 47, recently completed his fifth season as music director of the Los Angeles Doctors Symphony Orchestra. His father, Harry Shulman, was principal oboist for the NBC Symphony under Toscanini.
In his work and in his music, Shulman says the common thread is a search for excellence and a creative approach.
“Whether you’re conducting, whether you’re playing an oboe, there’s a hand-eye coordination that goes on that you need to take several layers higher, where you look for the inside of the music. It’s not enough to play the notes, but I always talk about playing music, which is the spaces between the notes. In medicine, it’s not just doing the operation, it’s taking care of the patient.”
Be it a difficult operation or a difficult piece of music, he approaches both with confidence.
“You never go into an operation planning on a patient dying. You understand there may be complications, but you never go into an operating room thinking this patient is going to die. . . . In music, it’s the same thing. It’s going to succeed. You just don’t accept the notion that it’s going to fail. How could it fail?”
Shulman has traveled throughout the world as tour physician for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He also has performed with the Philharmonic on oboe.
It’s OK, he says, if he never conducts at Carnegie Hall as long as he has hands to heal, ears to listen and a heart to contain his passion for music.
ED PARTIS
‘If a Tree Dies, I Really Feel It’
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When he was a child, Ed Partis took an orange crate and roller skates and created a scooter. He always could see possibilities within scraps of wood.
As he grew older, he built furniture, marveling at the beauty of flowing grain, the silky finish, the richness of oak or maple as he held it in his hands. It wasn’t until later that he learned to see life in wood.
In 1979, he took in his first bonsai tree, a gift from his sister-in-law. It lingered patiently in his back yard, waiting for him to take notice.
“I didn’t know bonsai from beans,” he says.
A couple of years later, his wife, Mary, was reading a magazine and noticed an upcoming Salvation Army sale and, not far from it, a geranium show. There also was an advertisement for a nursery featuring bonsai trees.
They decided to make a day of it and went to all three venues. The Salvation Army sale and the geraniums made no lasting impression, but the bonsai spoke clearly to Partis:
“The trees amazed me. I was shocked by their beauty.”
About that same time, he remembered the tree given as a gift, which had, with no help from him, survived. And like a child who sees something wonderful and exciting for the first time, Partis’ eyes were opened. Of the 80 or so bonsai in his ever-growing back-yard oeuvre, it remains one of his favorites.
As we move from one season of life to the next, we try to prepare for the changes. Just as we store wood for winter, Partis retired in 1991 after nearly 40 years as a technical illustrator with fuel to last a lifetime.
“Everybody asks you if you’re going to travel when you retire. I don’t like to travel,” he says. “This is where I want to be.”
The trees have given him means to connect with all living things. Tucked in a corner of his yard in West Los Angeles are cages where injured birds can heal.
He finds them and cares for them. A pigeon named Speckles was hatched in the cage, and now comes and goes as she pleases.
“The traditional Japanese belief is that man is a part of nature, whereas the Westernized version is that man is lord of nature. I agree with the Japanese, that we are a part of nature and that we should therefore enhance it and not destroy it. That’s how I feel about every living thing.”
Mary Partis thrives in his enjoyment of the art. She has watched her husband work in the back yard and seen the gentle, patient side of him unfold.
When he prepares and takes his trees to shows, it is not to win awards but to share his passion. It is the passion, not the prize, that sustains him.
“It’s a living art,” Partis says. “It’s invigorating, and it has given me a further appreciation of living things and the lives of living things. If a tree dies, I really feel it.”
He knows his trees will out-live him, and there is comfort in knowing they will live on. Still, he worries about their future and nature’s future.
“The biggest thing that worries me is: When I die, what’s going to happen to my trees? They are so much a part of my life, like my right arm, my children. All this is an extension of who I am. I don’t do this because I’m a great person and I feel like I’m doing a wonderful thing. I do it because they are a part of me, and I love them.”