I blame my cousin who passed along a half-finished Guillow's kit when I was maybe 14 or so.  I had built many plastic models (like every other kid in the 60s), but had never seen a stick-and-tissue model.  Over the next couple of years I build all of the Guillow's WWI kits.  Flew a couple (unsuccessfully) and mostly just enjoyed the building.  

Then life (college, career, marriage, kids, and overseas living and travel) took over.  Is was 2003 before I started building again...for the first time for RC.  Well, it's somehow 2026 and I'm still building...slowly.

More and more often now I think back to modelers who once frequented the various forums, but have moved on to other hobbies and indeed entirely other ways of life.  I was recently reminded of Donny Wilcox, a once prolific Scottish scale modeler.  He's still around and has an impressive YouTube channel documenting his amazing life exploring the nature of Scotland...without a word of his previous obsession with scale modeling.

There are certainly days that scale modeling is the farthest thing from my mind.