Casting a casual eye about me I see a record of interpretations. The interpretations are paramountly artistic – books, paintings, photographs, hand knotted rugs, furnishings, carvings, statues, toys, seals, crystal, lamps, clocks and walking sticks. Within many of them is a tale of adventure sometimes in turn insinuated by yet another story, another anecdote. What makes them all an interpretation is not so much their particular characteristic but rather their unique meaning to me. Identity is not always from without but often percolates from within.

Except perhaps in a museum, library or other similar venue of collections, it isn’t frequently that one sees within the private sphere what might be distinguished as eclectic. More often there is a discernible theme, one which reflects the proprietor. This isn’t to suggest the interpretation is void of dimension. Indeed the interpretation may be entirely whimsical perhaps for example devoted to fanciful or quirky renditions which subliminally illustrate the curious features of the master or mistress.

For reasons not clear to me, I am a writer.  I strangely align the proclivity to playing the piano which I also do. Both I see as matters of interpretation. At the age of fourteen years I began keeping a diary.  Within a year of that I taught myself to type as a result of which I carried my late mother’s Smith Corona portable typewriter with me from prep school to undergraduate to law school and finally to my first years of law practice until the advent of personal computers. Alas the ancient mechanical device is lost among discarded refuse.

Smith Corona is an American manufacturer of thermal labels, direct thermal labels, and thermal ribbons used in warehouses for primarily barcode labels. Once a large U.S. typewriter and mechanical calculator manufacturer, it expanded aggressively during the 1960s to become a broad-based industrial conglomerate whose products extended to paints, foods, and paper. The mechanical calculator sector was wiped out in the early 1970s by the production of cheap electronic calculators, and the typewriter business collapsed in the mid-1980s due to the introduction of PC-based word processing.

I have since translated my writing to include an autobiography, a history of our local Masonic Lodge, biographies of Almonte personalities, contributing editorials for the Millstone News, blogs and a web site. It is illustrative of the cathartic purpose of my writing that I seldom re-read what I have written. This element captures the primary relevance of what I have written to me alone. As proof of the conviction I have unhesitatingly destroyed in excess of twenty years of handwritten diaries for no other reason than that they had fulfilled their modest purpose and contemporaneously did not compete with my now preferable and enhanced vehicle of endorsement afforded by the internet. My vanity is sufficient to inspire me to delight any possible audience but the objective remains overwhelmingly and solely a matter of interpretation not reputation. Perhaps it harkens back to my early isolation in boarding school where all this began. For whatever reason I distinctly recall the first words uttered to me by my Housemaster, “Sir!“, he punctuated whatever I had said. The imperative was to learn to live with it and to get the best out of it.

A common refrain among those initiating the desire to write is that they haven’t anything thought-provoking about which to write. In doing so they mistake both the purpose of writing and the equation of their personal familiarity with nothingness, as though their view of the world, their isolated observations and reflections are somehow void of merit or too minute and petty to be of any consequence. Therein lies the error! First, there is nothing popular about any one of us; each of us has his or her peculiar and synthetic way of interpreting the world and our contribution to it and performance in it. Our chronicle is as a result a singular and an easily related story or account; all the ingredients are already at hand though likely simmering below the surface. Second, few of us derive especial thrill from the simple relation of fact; instead it is the native manner in which we interpret the events. I have found that almost nothing we think is inconsequential. We are natural creations, each a product of highly specific and individual resources.  Indeed our personality is as much a curiosity to us as it is to others. It is an unwitting flaw to assume that our manifestation of the myriad ingredients which compose our being is dull or boring.