I’m a loner.
I have no wife, no girlfriend and very few friends, who mostly live kind of far away from me. There are a couple of reasons for this. For one, I am coarse, intense, bossy, intimidating, opinionated, bold, outspoken, without tact, a Christian and I’m just rather unpleasant to be around other than in small doses. The other reason I’m a loner is that I don’t really mind it. I find it to be rather cozy and I enjoy my freedom. I keep myself very good company. I enjoy reflective time spent alone. I rarely get lonely, but sometimes I do and it’s very real, but I push on through. And to think, I’ve had beautiful girlfriends (never married) and lots of so-called friends throughout the years. My place was the place that everyone gathered at and hung out. My back porch always had a dozen people on it drinking beer, playing music, playing guitar, talking politics, playing games and just hanging out having fun. I know how to make myself likeable, which is important in business and sales especially. I can charm people quite easily. People often find me very interesting too, but still, I find myself at a time in life where I am alone almost all the time, except for when I visit my folks who live nearby.
So what do I like to do with all my alone time? One thing I like to do is travel about 2 hours to my favorite seacoast town in New Hampshire and just take it all in. It’s the town of Portsmouth and it’s wonderful. It has so much charm and such a rich history going all the way back to colonial America. It’s the quintessential New England town. It’s funny because it’s a rather urban place, quite hustling and bustling. I usually steer clear of those kinds of places and only found myself here by happenstance one day, when to my surprise I started to realize that I really liked this town. The market square is so beautiful and there isn’t any litter on the ground anywhere. You have to walk 3 blocks just to see a single cigarette butt on the ground. The buildings downtown are mostly brick and they are very old, but they’re kept up so perfectly. There are many shops up and down the streets with showcase windows done up professionally, such that each of them looks like a picture perfect image that belongs on a magazine. Just outside of the downtown area is another area called Strawberry Banke and it has old houses going back to the 1600s. The dates are on plaques on the houses. 1743, 1722, 1643 and so on. The streets are so narrow in that part of town that two cars can’t pass by one another. All of the houses are right up on the street too, with no front yards. Still, everybody has flower pots and other decorative items out front and everything looks picture perfect.
The Piscataqua river runs right into the sea along the edge of Portsmouth and it makes for a gorgeous scene. The tug boats dock right there on the side of the road in the river.
I’ve spent many a day driving to this place just to park my car and lazily stroll around town, looking around, thinking, reflecting, observing, the outsider looking in. There are more great places to eat in this town than any other place I’ve ever been to. Did I mention that the people are really nice here? They are very friendly, especially for New England where it must be admitted that most people are rather standoffish. There is music all around. There are bands playing in pubs all over the city all night long and people crisscrossing the street everywhere you go. Lots of beautiful girls too. There are some great book stores in this town as well. It reads like a fairy tale and that’s just what it’s like here.
One thing I love to do is take a nice 5 mile walk around the town. Actually, I walk outside of the downtown area and then circle around it on the back roads. Some of them are main roads too but still, I’m away from the hustle and bustle and among the houses that look like all the houses you see in any old New England town. And I just walk. When I’m walking all kinds of interesting thoughts come to me. Sometimes I make lots of time to pray. Other times I happen to notice what the people in these homes are watching on TV. These days everyone has their TV up on their wall, except me, I don’t have a TV. Anyhow, because the TVs are up on the wall (that’s where flat-screen TVs go) you can see what people are watching when you walk by the house. Many people watch the cable news channels. These folks are cozy and comfortable in their living rooms, husband with wife, kicked back on the couch like any other normal American, clicker in hand, watching the tube.
But not me.
No. I am in a strange town 120 miles away from home on a work night, walking on the sidewalk at 11:00 PM, wandering, wandering, wandering aimlessly, relishing the wee bit of melancholy that accompanies my often pensive mood. I am completely marinated in poignancy. At once I am grateful to God to be alive and that he has allowed me to stop and smell the roses in ways that the normal people can’t or don’t do, but, I also realize that I am cast out into the outer darkness of society, and that I am alone. I wonder to myself, “What am I doing out here?”. One time the police talked to me because they saw me in this park at night looking suspicious. I just had to take a leak really badly so I went behind the bushes in the park. On my way out of the park back to the road, I stopped to admire the stillness of the night and to look up at the stars. I decided to take a rest by sitting on top of one of the picnic tables and look at my phone. Then, when I left the park, the cops came up and stopped me walking in the road, wanting to know what I was doing peeking in people’s windows and prowling around! I was shocked. I told them what I was doing, but left out the park about taking a leak in the park, lest they bust me for something like indecent expose or some other trumped up charge. They couldn’t accept that I was just taking a walk, alone, at that time of night, when I lived 120 miles away. They thought it was too weird to be true. “So you’re just up here, 120 miles from home with your car parked downtown, and you’re way out here, just walking around down the street – just because? I’m not buying it!”. That’s what the cop said to me, but what could I say? Is it a crime to be a wandering weirdo?
For a while I stopped going to my favorite town as I soured on it after this incident, but after a year or so I went back. Oh, I had been back before a year. In fact I was back the next week, but I just didn’t take my favorite long walk around the town. That is, outside the perimeter of the downtown area. You see, once you leave the downtown area where all the action is, it gets very quiet. Downtown is noisy, but it’s a nice noisy. Lots of life. Lots of action. Lots of fun. But as soon as you get on your way up the road, it becomes still and quiet, like a rural country town. You can hear a pin drop. You can still hear the dull roar of the highway traffic way off in the distance, and in one part of the walk you actually cross over a bridge that goes over the highway, so you hear the cars loud and clear at that point, but it’s different than the clanging and banging of the downtown area. I thoroughly enjoy doing this. This is my walk. So many thoughts and feelings come to mind that otherwise don’t seem to happen to me. It’s as though I’m lost and looking for something, but I don’t know what. And sometimes I find it, but I still don’t know what it is.
On my peaceful walks I find myself thinking about so many different kinds of things that I couldn’t possibly mention them all, but I do find myself thinking about when I was a kid. I remember being trapped in school, wishing I was anywhere but there, dreaming of an escape. I remember learning about Edgar Allan Poe and other American writers in middle school and high school and some of their stories vaguely cross my mind, as they were set in New England, some of them. I remember sitting in that classroom wondering what life had in store for me, wondering how I would ever get my act together and how I would ever really function in the real world like a normal adult, someday. In between those daydreams in school, I realized that I actually liked these old writers. Without knowing it, I bonded with them, if that’s at all possible, over the one thing we had in common: escapism. The authors escaped by writing their stories and creating alternate realities to hide themselves in. I escaped by reading a little bit of them and letting my imagination carry me away. Fast forward 30 years and here I am, wandering around a strange town that I almost never visited as a kid, walking through the streets, observing the normal folks who have to get up and work in the morning, as I stroll down their streets in their town, putting one foot in front of the other, half in the present and half back in school, dreaming of my escape, along with Poe.
Somehow, I find the whole experience to be very enriching. I feel as though some great truth about life is being revealed to me, but it’s in a foreign language of sorts. I know something profound has enveloped me, but I can hardly understand what it is, yet I know it’s there and I know it’s real. My lonesome wandering is very rewarding. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
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