What's Normal?

I have never been "normal." I seem to be outside of most groups, looking in, trying to blend in or figure out what I should be doing to fit in. With all these decades of practice, I might be the only one who knows I am not fitting in. Sometimes I wonder if the act has become the reality, and this is what I am habituated to be from now on. The new normal.

It is the kind of philosophy exercise that is more fun when drunk. We all learn at some point that "this" color is called blue. And we slowly recognize that everybody else defines it as blue too. I have some colorblind friends, and I am sure they had tons of confusion because people would identify the same colors with different names. They weren't "normal" but eventually worked out the solution, or at least recognized the problem.

Some things that go on with me, inside my head, are and always have been. I don't know if everybody has them. I get constant flashes of disjointed memories - for no reason. Sometimes they trigger others, sometimes they are just a vivid place or setting...random neurons releasing data. And once the memory pops up, it is clear as yesterday, and refreshed so it isn't from 20 years ago, or longer, it is from today. These things happen without my willing them to, and I can't stop them. I once tried to explain why this was disturbing to me, to my shrink, and she didn't get it. It was as if she saw it as "normal" that people had these vivid flashbacks all the time, and maybe it is. But for me it doesn't seem like what everybody else goes through. Junior Sawyer on New Road had oxen. He was a big guy in denim overalls. There was a field of sheep, and the farm butted against the shore of the Bay (and I never realized the bay came around that side of town - I always associated it with Bay Road, and the farms out there - once I remember being taken to a barn on Bay Road that belonged to the father of my 2nd grade teacher, to see a newborn calf. I don't remember her name, but it will come back within 30 minutes without me trying. The crazy part is, these memories are from at least 40 years ago. I have no clue how my parents knew these people, or why I was there. I just remember.)

So, rather than seeming odd by blurting out these memories, which by the way won't make any sense to anybody who didn't grow up in my small New Hampshire town - and there are fewer and fewer of them, and the town is slowly changing and evolving out of what it was back then. In fact, I think it is already something different, and only lives in my memory (flash - running (literally on foot) around the town after a huge summer storm that theoretically spawned a tornado. Rain, downed wires on the Weitzel's "new" house across from the cemetery where trees were snapped off like twigs 15 feet up. Over the Elm Street hill by the little league park, police loudspeakers telling people to go home. I know I wasn't alone, but I have no clue who was with me. I also can't place the year, but I would have been in early high school, I think. Back in those days, and still, I don't really remember street names, just that so-and-so lived there. Like the little street across from Marcotte's that ran to the right of the fire station (which I imagine is no longer a fire station), with the wrinkle ranch to the right (which had a youth center I remember frequenting, and before that was a day care), and the street made a 90 degree right turn and a couple of houses down on the right was the "old" Weitzel house. And that street eventually meets Elm Street.

OK, done rambling now. Imagine, though, this happening all the time in your head, and you are powerless to stop it, but just dragged along for the ride. Is it any wonder I work so hard on distracting myself (to no avail, usually).