Can you inherit interests?

Somehow, along the way, I came to find myself sharing certain interests with my father. I'm not exactly sure how this came to be, but it's something that I find I still have, even after he's gone>

The desert. When I was nine years old we moved from Lousiana to California, and came to live in a suburb of Los Angeles. But my dad wasn't really all that thrilled with the suburbs of Los Angeles. Instead, it came to be that he grew to love the desert. When we were young, he would take us on weekend trips into the high desert of inland California, and we would wander around its empty spaces, finding odd things to see and do.

Stamp collecting. I really have no idea how my dad came to be interested in collecting stamps, but I remember that when I was young, he would let me sit in his den with him, as we did things like soaking old envelopes to separate the stamp from the envelope, examining the resulting stamps under magnifying glasses, and looking up each stamp in a specialty catalog to learn more about whether this was a special and interesting stamp, in which case we would happily mount the stamp into its position in the album.

Cryptic crosswords. I came to this rather late, rather than as a child, when at some point I visited my parents and they had a cryptic crossword open on the breakfast table. Cryptics feature a blend of word play and puzzles that is quite hard to explain unless you've tried them. I'm really not very good at them, but I love to try to solve them, and when I got stuck I would just ask my dad and he would explain the answer.

The United States Coast Guard. Most Americans, I'd say, have pretty much no idea what the USCG is, and what it does, but my father was a career coastie, eventually rising to and retiring as a Captain in the Coast Guard Reserve. He helped me understand what the Coast Guard does, and why it is so unusual among all the US armed forces.