anchortown

I recently revived friendships with a couple of people I used to work with back in my professional musician days, long ago and far away in the fabled town of Anchorage, Alaska. It's been 30 years since Carrie and Jerry and I traveled into that unknown, frozen land to do a six-week gig as the house band at a little gin mill on a downtown corner, the Keyboard Lounge. I ended up staying for seven years, and Jerry stayed longer than that. Carrie, always the most volatile of the group, stayed about a year, left, came back, got married in Anchorage, and then left for good, ending up in Florida. I landed in California via Boston, then eventually returned to the home of my adolescence, Seattle. Jerry's been a music producer and nightclub owner in Texas for the last 20 years.

It was surprisingly easy for the three of us to resume the conversation where we left off so long ago, and that left me wondering whether people ever change at the most fundamental levels. I would probably seem like an entirely different person today than Dave the Drummer who appeared nightly at the Keyboard, drank too much, smoked too much, and talked too much using too much loud profanity, expressive of deep-seated resentments. My life has been transformed in many ways since then, and the transformation continues, but talking to Carrie and Jerry I realized that deep down, we're all the same people we always were. A person might refine himself and the way he lives, but the foundations of the personality are lodged deeply and immovably, having been set in place during the earliest phases of our forming personalities.

I think you can teach an old dog new tricks, and even new habits, but you can't change him into a different dog.

Etaoin Shrdlu
--30--