Everywhere I go I meet myself.

Everywhere I go I meet myself.

This isn’t exactly a Zen motto (although perhaps it should be)

I mean that lately I keep on running into various earlier versions of myself. Mostly the sad, confused, vulnerable ones and although I often have a tremendous urge to help and treat them with compassion I do occasionally have the compulsion to give them a huge shove and run away screaming “NO! Not that again! I can’t bear it!”

That is not my highest inner voice, obviously.

And how very telling of my own lack of integration that I do not always immediately recognise these incarnations and their gifts.

These are usually, perhaps unsurprisingly, children.

This past July 4^th I had taken Five on a little trip, just we two, to visit my father and his family in Washington DC. On the day itself there was a party at my his country house in Virginia. Sixty-three acres of rolling hills, trees and swimming pond, plus about 30 adults and assorted children all milling about at the obligatory patriotic barbeque. Five was the youngest for a change and was delightedly lapping up all the attention that being a visiting grandchild accords, and she bossily showed the others what poison ivy looked like and where the stores of insect eggs she had discovered were hidden. The children – aged between five and ten – roamed around in a cheerful gang.

All of them except Max.

He was very, extremely busy with important things, the vast majority of which involved being told off for antisocial behaviour by his exasperated father.

Max found it quite hard not to hit outdoor furniture with large sticks ripped off ancient, live oaks, or do suspicious things with lengths of rope that he found in hitherto locked sheds. He was also rather fond of kicking unspecified foreign objects around the lawn with that combination of aimless aggression and lurching menace that only young boys and bored, caged apes can muster. My father calls it ‘lurgging around’ (with a hard ‘G’). Max was had turned the lurgging dial up to eleven and was clearly driving his father bananas, thus the constant, badgering admonishments. He was also succeeding in alienating the other children who were mostly focussed on ice cream eating, Mother-May-I-playing, insect hunting and swimming.
Not tree-murder and smacking each other.

Poor Max.
To add to his woes there was only one other boy present.
Enter Joseph: An exceptionally beautiful and sweet-natured child a few years younger who had been rather fiercely claimed by Five, so whenever Max tried to play, in a cackhanded, puppyish male way, he would be trumped by the superior social manoeuvering of the girls and eventually give up and wander off feeling left out and resentful, as if he didn’t quite understand how to insert himself into the social structure. Heartbreaking. It transpired a little later, from tidbits I overheard, that Max suffered from a mild form of Asperger’s syndrome; interaction was a challenge for him under any circumstances and he was frequently frustrated and angered by emotions he could not name or easily express– thus the stick and rope show. In addition his parents had split up recently – painful for anyone – and to top it all off his little sister, who at that moment was having a grand old time as the eldest of the girl gang, was streaking ahead of him academically, socially and athletically.
It just wasn’t fair on the guy.
I began to feel quite sympathetic towards him for wanting to beat up the plant life – I would too.
But alas, as with all of us who are in the midst of a crisis, his awkward behaviour did not exactly endear him to people. What most of us saw was a badly behaved, angry boy, past the age of redeeming cuteness but nevertheless in the terrible realm of childhood powerlessness,  still crucial steps away from adolescence where at least he might find company in other kids who would wear black and write bad poetry.

Interestingly, Joseph was more willing than the other kids to tolerate Max and his idiosyncracies , but it was Joseph’s father who wanted to keep him away from the dischordant boy.
A bad influence, he muttered.  A destructive, angry child who would not be good for the sunny, happy-go-lucky sweetie-pie seven-year old.
I could appreciate that, although it might be fair to point out that the dad himself had what you might generously term a chequered past that was still not in its present incarnation, a gleaming path of white tiles.
I suppose, though, the more deprived of innocence one is oneself, the more viciously one guards it in one’s offspring.
I am also guilty of this. I should not judge.

The removal of Joseph left Max with literally nobody to play with. So after being told rather firmly by me that he should not jump up and down in my dad’s prized miniature japanese ornamental cherry tree and break off its branches, he wandered off sulkily and sought refuge, once again, in his friends the sticks.

By now I was past vexation and just felt desperately sorry for him, so I followed, wondering what I could say to make him feel a bit better.

For a few moments I was at a loss for words.

Middle aged, middle class mother looks at disconsolate, annoying boy and wonders what to say to younger generation.

Um. Uh.Let’s see now…

Was I just another irritating grownup who would say something eye-rollingly unhelpful?

I could feel an apron growing out of my suddenly spreading middle and a bun and spectacles sprouting out of my silly, fat, greying head like the terrifying special effects in the movie “She’s getting OLD and OUT OF TOUCH!”.

No, wait! STOP! That’s not me. That is not why I am here!! Erase!! Rewind!! (what is this ‘rewind’ says Gen Y?)

Here is a child, ten years old; angry, sad, lonely, feeling bad about himself, surrounded by kids he doesn’t fit in with and adults who don’t understand him.
I know EXACTLY how that feels. I may not want to remember, but I do.
It feels like shit and actually anyone who reaches out without patronising is going to help.

Max was beating up an imaginary foe.

“Are you practicing your Samurai” I asked.

“How did you know I liked Samurai?” suspicious an defiant, but also a bit pleased.

“A wild guess”

He suppresses a smile, thinks a bit, then throws me a challenge. His eyes are hard and arms are crossed.

“Did you know I really like punk rock music? And heavy metal? I like the Sex Pistols and the Clash. I listen to it a lot. My Dad hates it. It’s VERY LOUD!”

Little does he realise that this, for me, is the golden ticket.

I laugh.

“That is very cool, Max. Did you know that I like punk rock music too? I have actually seen the Clash in concert when I was about your age. And your dad is SUPPOSED to hate it! Good for you. Make it as loud as you can.”

“You’ve SEEN the Clash?” (so easy to impress a 10 year old) “Did you know that Sid Vicious was in the Sex Pistols??” (how cute is that?)

At this point Joseph’s mother, with whom I have been friends since we were young teenagers wanders over. She and I are veterans of the DC Hardcore scene (that’s punk, not porn for anyone who is wondering, and yes, we started going to shows when we were, um, about 3) .

I tell her that Max is into punk and metal and she is completely enchanted and demands to know who his favourite bands are. He lists a few obvious choices (Pistols, Clash, Ramones). Upon further quizzing we realise that he doesn’t really know any other bands which is really rather sweet. We tell him that we were into that kind of music when we were young and that J’s mother used to have purple hair and that I used to have pink hair and that neither of us wore any colour except black and he is totally enthralled. Then J’s mother tells him that I used to be a rock star and he practically faints with delight. He tells us he plays guitar, though not very well. We tell him that this is entirely appropriate for a punk rocker and that in the beginning none of them could play either. He is immensely cheered by this. He confides that none of the kids he knows like his music or understand it and that he wants to be in a band but nobody else does or wants to play with him. We ascertain that he’s in 5^th grade and we advise him to spend the next two years playing very loud music, practicing his guitar, writing songs and by the time he hits junior high he will find others who are ready and able to be in a band with him and then he will be streets ahead. He then asks us, with great peer-to-peer seriousness what instruments we play and we chat, with surprising ease, about the pros and cons of bass versus guitar and how being a vocalist is good in some ways but limiting in others. He already sounds like a real musician. I feel great hope for him.

I tell him that Joseph’s mother and I met and became friends because we were part of a group of outcast kids who didn’t fit in with anyone else. We were all angry or sad or misfits and that was why we loved that music. That was why he loved that music. It sounded like he felt inside.  I told him that whenever he felt mad or sad to take that feeling, which was an energy, and pick up his guitar – just like his heroes – and put it into the music. It was going to be better, and feel better, than throwing a stick around. It didn’t matter if he sucked. It just mattered that he did it.

As I told him this he looked straight into my eyes and for a moment or two our souls locked. He knew I was telling him the something important.
He knew because he has a keen ear for music and he can recognise the ring of truth.

Then we asked him if he wanted some ideas for new bands to listen to.

He did.

We got a pen and paper and started writing them down.

It started out with J’s mother and me thinking up a few fairly accessible (read chart-friendly) punk bands for Max to get on with. We felt some sense of responsibility for his musical education so we gave him The Damned, Siouxsie and the Banshees and a couple of other obvious choices. Then my dad wandered up and suggested we also lead him forward in time – he might also like some early Ska music – I had loved it at his age. Ok, on the list. Then J’s mother insisted we compile a separate DC hardcore list- he is a DC kid, after all, and then we could impress him with all the people we personally know at a later date and feel less old and has-beenish (although surely that would make us feel more has-beenish?). Then J’s father reappeared, suddenly changing his tune (geddit?) declaring himself an authority on punk and started adding obscure-but-important bands so that I had to turn over the page and keep scribbling. An unlikely looking, slightly sweaty economist who had been eavesdropping piped up from the porch that he, himself, was a metalhead – he felt this category was underrepresented – and gave us a number of loud suggestions for eardrum explosion. It was getting hard to keep up with it all, and the crowd kept growing.

Meanwhile Max was in complete heaven. He had gone from ostracized outcast to the life and soul of the party in just a few minutes. This was very touching to see. And more than that, he had inspired a reunion of sorts – it turned out that all of us clustered around the ever-enlarging list had been Max in one guise or another. Here we all were, showing off to one another that we belonged, after all.
To the music, to each other, to ourselves, and ultimately to Max.

Max was overheard later telling my father that this was the “Best party EVER, THANKS!” and he hugged me tightly before he left.

But really, I think it’s me who owes something to him.

Thank you Max.

Thanks for the memories.

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