Gettin up a few Mornings ago, I came out of the door, buck naked, and stopped in my tracks. Shocked myself just for a split second. Who was that? Oh. Really just me on a week day 5:00A.M. morning. What is this mirror doing here startling me? I’ve seen it here for years, now. Just haven’t seen it reflecting back at me. To0 early all together for this image. Mirrors are obvious as one avenue for self-recognition. In one room of my house, I am content to be still or to be contemplative, and yet in another I see myself as a raconteur, a bon vivant, something of a rogue, even a pirate. Different rooms/ same self/ different views of self. Some of the mirrors in our house are antiques, with a milky quality to them, and one can imagine going into them rather than simply letting them reflect the room of the moment..

Mirrors must surely not be what they seem. They change, they hold history and give different stories depending upon where they’ve been. In this case, where we’ve both been. I have usually tried to avoid looking in them for any length of time; mostly so that I’m not judged to be guilty of the sin of vanity, nor to be thought self-important. I was taught early about the sin of vanity. Much of my behavior around mirrors is based upon not being caught looking. I’ll admit that I certainly have looked, but in only tiny portions or blinks of time. A glance and then a look away.

There are several of what I’d call magical mirrors among those hung in various rooms around our Portland home. There are two bathroom mirrors, newly installed. Those “new” bathroom mirrors are magical in their own way because as Alice said in answer to who she was: “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” When I first spot myself in the early morning I tend to see a fun-house version of my hair….standing stark up in back or off at oblique angles. I see puffy eyes and facial features I almost don’t recognize. I far prefer seeing myself put-together, after a shower, hair combed.

Over the years, in passing moments, I have been too busy, too rushed, to pay attention to what I happened to see in a mirror. I did fancy myself as dashing, cool, with flair in those brief glimpses. I’d guess the person I saw in the mirror was defined by shirts, ties, or details who I was playing in life. Usually my persona was seen very briefly, as I didn’t want to fall subject to the Narcissus’ problem. Shaving, not required of me for many a year, has come back to be an issue in the present because I’ve come back to a beard style which shows my cheeks. The beard described as being a “Van Dyke.” (Irony intended),

I am surprised these days to see my father in the shaving mirror. The young Stanislavsky would stare at his mirrored self, and deliberately manipulate his image with make-up/ and make-overs: spectacles, hats, glued on beards, and prosthetic noses all in order to play specific roles, and I am aware that I do the same with various styles of beards as a constant. I do still fear that I’ve become too much of a Narcissus. Caught up for an extended amount of shaving time in my current “look” I realize that almost like the tide recedes, my hair has backed gradually away from the shore of my face. When did it do that? When did legally blonde become licensed gray? Eyes are shrouded, skin shows evidence of wear and tear. Fine lines of past worries are etched into my forehead.

These new bathroom mirrors turn out to be as magical as those old familiar, decorative ones that have moved with us three or four times. These old friends haven’t been broken during any of our journeys, so I think of them as lucky. Just last night one of them came up in a bed-time, pillow-talk funny conversation with my wife. Now a mirror near our bed, isn’t what initially comes to mind. To tell a tale about watching bed-time sexual activities in the mirror would be an invented piece of extravagant bad taste; and also not true. My closing thought of the night was that I needed to ease the bedroom door just a tad more closed, because I didn’t want to see myself looking back should I make an odd glance off my side of our bed. In other words, I didn’t want to watch, nor to inadvertently catch myself watching. Simply put “sex-in-process” is not the reason the mirror is there. It’s there to catch a little added light, and to make the landing outside our bedroom seem larger. It has a mainly decorative reason for its existence.. More to do with decorative the aesthetics of light than activity. More form than function. To see myself would be distracting and uninvited, as mentioned especially at 5:00 in the morning.

When we packed up our earthly possessions to get ready for our next life- move, we think, “ah yes, then (after the move) we’ll be the same, but in this new place.” But is it true? Sometimes yes, and of course, sometimes it rains. Is the rain even exactly the same? Well it is still wet, but it does come down in quite measurable amounts. It stands to reason that if it picks up moisture in say the Gulf of Mexico the water produced there will be significantly different from the rain that was filtered through Casco Bay. Average inches of rainfall are measured and reported, but there is a change in the “feel” of the rain as it comes down. I mean soaking-wet can be Portland, Maine cold-wet, or Mobile, Alabama damp-wet, and no one will persuade me that they are the same. Place modifies all equations.

“Who are you when you’re at home?” The British question, used both to be intentionally funny and used as a taunt. It is a question out of “music hall.” When asked in sincerity it suggests: “What are you like when you’re not “on,” or “What are you like when you are not being “high and mighty?” It suggests also that we all believe that our private face might be more authentic somehow, a more truthful expression when we’re not caught up in our tendency to be performative in mirrors. We glance at our private face, and instantly transform it to a public one.

I’ve always felt that those micro-seconds of stolen glances may have been a way of checking on my secretive, more authentic, private self. In a sense it is echoing James Joyce’s: “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” as he says in The Dubliners. We like to imagine that we are self-aware, but we don’t admit that we use, only split-second checks in the mirror do so. Without them, I’m convinced, we lose ourselves. We usually only see what we see in the eyes of others.

When we get dislodged, move to a new place for example, we don’t know where stuff is. We don’t know where we put our keys, our wallets, or our shoe polish? Routine and having our “stuff in-it’s place” usually saves us steps in our normal walking around world. If we think things valuable, and we don’t want to look around for them, we develop routine “drop-spots” for them. (In Dutch homes, one always finds the shoes at the door.) We think that our wallets and credit cards to be important. So we stash them in an easily accessible drawer or put them on a dresser top. I’ve directed plays where I have asked actors to bump or jangle a hanging set of keys to illustrate to an audience that they are at home. I’m suggesting that we could add the very important idea of checking in a mirror to this category of habits.

I began this thought and wrote of mirrors it as I packed up to leave Alabama, I’ve since arrived at three different places in three different states. The first, in Virginia, had a bathroom with only one mirror. The second, in N.Y., had a very small mirror above a sink in a bathroom, and another one in a back bedroom. Our new home, in Portland, has several of our own stored, traveling, and favorite mirrors. One hangs above our fireplace.

We hung it immediately, without thinking it to have any significance beyond that It was a perfect fit. As we have become more settled we continue to find ourselves more “at home,” especially when we glimpse and “see ourselves” above the fireplace. What defines home more than seeing oneself above a hearth?

How do we recognize ourselves in most residences unless in a mirror? Why are mirrors important? Do we see in them our more authentic self? What do they reveal to us? Do we consciously see them at all? My premise is that we don’t really want to catch ourselves looking in mirrors unless at a wash basin where it is acceptable to do so. How can we brush our teeth without them, or put in our contacts? I suggest we get past this and recognize their symbolic, habitual and almost ritualistic importance.

This brings me to the character of Narcissus. His myth is linked to the story of Echo. I hadn’t known of the second part of his myth. Echo’s story combines elements of jealousy and love and has always been told when speaking of Narcissus. The myth tells us that Echo was full of guile and an inventive chatterbox, who saved Jove from being caught “flagrant delicti” by distracting his wife Juno with gossip and chat. When Juno realized she’d been fooled, she invoked her revenge by placing a curse upon Echo. Echo was to not be able to speak in the future except only to repeat what was said to her.

Narcissus is also caught within a prediction as avoided by his parents. He is to have a long and prosperous life, as long as he doesn’t come to“know himself.” His parents took this to mean that if he would see his young self in a mirror it would be ruinous. Since they were aware of his exceptional beauty and robust health, they were determined that he not overestimate or recognize his beauty. Consequently, from his youth on they removed all mirrors from his home. They were not going to have their child vain about his appearance. This explains why he didn’t know what he was seeing when he stumbled upon his own reflection in a still deep pond. Quite attracted to his own youth and beauty, and not really aware of who he was seeing in the pond’s reflection, he called out. Echo being near, not only saw him but heard his call. She had fallen in love with him, she had no words or voice to express this love other than to repeat what she heard him say. Love both unrequited, and unrecognized, the two beautiful young Greeks are frozen in their respective fates. Narcissus, frozen to gaze at himself in the mirror of a pond. Echo frozen and only able to repeat each word she heard spoken. A haunting vision of love as trapped in pure appearance, and a with an admirer unable to express herself..

Narcissus was in love with what he saw, while I am surprised and shocked seeing myself in the morning. I have expectations and memories based upon those stolen glimpses over the years. As I have said, I had been taught not to be caught admiring my “looks” when I was young. I more or less recorded and accepted my sense of self fixed in my mind over the years. I dutifully checked the length of my ties, and to see if my clothes matched in color, and would trim my beard. All to be consistent with what I thought I should look like when I was feeling good about life and aimedd to be socially or professionally-presentable.

Now that I’ve decided to let my hair and beard grow, I find looking into the mirror is allowed to take longer. No longer worried about Narcissism, I indulge myself to notice and question: what’s going on with this grey hair and grey beard? I had realized only after my wife commented upon it, that my hair now covers less territory than it once did. It’s thinner up there. My forehead goes back, in the area that I would call the natural part in my hair. I’ve always had little bumps or dark spots as if in a “paint by number canvas.” Such dots I had to talk myself into thinking unimportant. When young I believed such bumps and dark spots to be mountainous. Now my face has the same spots which remind me of a field full of scattered stones spread across a seashore. No not mountains at all, more like sand with some well-travelled paths. The paths do seem evidence of life’s worries, experiences, as well as lingering remnants of scrutiny, doubt, and above all laughter.. Bumps and creases seem almost like hills and valleys that have been reacted to my journeys all along; while I’ve often been too busy or too distracted to notice the changes. Glances in the mirror have been judiciously brief all along. I do seem to remember that I was once particularly wide eyed as a youth and my brow and eyes now appear guarded. Eyes looking into the sunny day as it changes to haze. Thinking myself in a sense lucky to see this weathered self and not needing to rush away from the image in the mirror. 
What I see still seems strange and from a time I’m not sure I am ready to love.