Cleaning windows on the funny house

It's amazing how comforting a cup of coffee can be.

A large cup is warming my hands right now - or at least when I'm not typing - music plays, I contemplate slow bites of a turkey sandwich here at the NorthStar.

The county is slowly re-wiring itself back together from the weekend's ice storm.  I have friends from the Orchard living in outlying communities who have gone 72 hours and more without power.

Only gas powered generators keep their iPhones charged and allow them to post to Facebook so we can all track their travail.

Those of you - if there actually are any of you reading this - who eschew technology on the surface can easily think we're all a little mad about it.

And you'd be right.

But sometimes a little madness helps.  Sometimes madness is all you've got.

A writer-friend of mine - a very perceptive writer-friend - has advanced the theory that we are are most authentic selves, in real time, when we are around twelve years of age.  

Generally around Sixth grade.

Her thinking is that having not reached the obsessive fixation on "others" implied by puberty - but still retaining the inherent "childlike" imaginative/creative qualities of pre-pubesence - we are most willing to be who we were made to be.

I'm not exactly sure I'm expressing her mechanism correctly - but I am sure there is something there worth looking into.

She came to this conclusion by examining her journals from that age.  This might mess the whole thing up right there because not that many twelve year-olds are avid journalists.  By being precocious - conscious ahead of her time, in the literal sense - she may be the exception that demonstrates the need for the rule - all twelve year-olds should be that intelligent - or at least journal their thoughts where they can learn from them.

Still, I look at my own thoughts from that time - what I remember of them - and remember conflict with being forced to play baseball, being removed from the split advanced class (what we would call a G/T class today) for not doing homework and drawing pictures all the time - which my mother never forgave me for to her dying day (or, well, maybe she did).

That's when I discovered playing and writing music - formally, at least, I began playing trombone in the school band and prevailed on Mom to buy me a blank book of big-lined music paper at Saied Music - OK, so maybe she got a little of me  - and my Dad wanting m to succeed in sports - which I played for the fun of and not to win - maybe that's what confused him most.

I think the coincidence of how I am myself at twelve and me at fifty-two - a strange mathematical synchronicity - is good to know but not really something to be upset over.

Quite the opposite - I left teaching, torpedoed my immediate financial condition - not that anything has really changed in terms of the day-to-day actions of my life except I write more and enjoy it more honestly - left teaching to break to cycle of trying to be myself in a way that wasn't the best choice.

So here I am, on a gray day in Maine, warming my hands on the cup of coffee before me.  The pictures are just random shots tracing my walk through the Old Port and here to the foot of Munjoy Hill.

And my question is this - am I trying to recover myself from 4 decades past or am I trying to be who I am now and that past is part of it?

Probably not worth worrying about it.  I've got music to write.