Many years ago I knew a guy named Alan. We were both regulars at the Nelson Coffeehouse, where he would often play the banjo. In spite of that we become friends. For his day job, Alan was a minister in one of those pristine white churches that characterize our small New England villages. He seemed to enjoy his work, and I suspect he did okay at it. At the time he was also going to graduate school, to become qualified as a therapist, and his rationale was thus: he was on the threshold of being forty, and he was predicting that some time in the next decade he was going go have a mid-life crises which would, among other things, create a desire for a career change. He wanted to have alternative credentials in the bag so that when that happened, he could just turnkey into his new line of work.

Sometimes I feel like a kid that just fell in love and feels that it is necessary to brag about every little thing they have in common with the special person they’ve just met.

The problem is that I’m 46 years old, have lived in Cheshire county for five years, and am a little slow on the uptake.