Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

I try to understand what’s going on today through the lens of universal history. Maybe that’s why sometimes when I’m having a good day with no anxiety my mind will do a metaphysical thing and suddenly it feels like seemingly unrelated now-and-then events separated by a mechanical clock are taking place all together at the same time, now, here, in “real” time.

I call such moments my “bean visions,” when the entire poem is seen from beginning to end all at once in an instant.

I’ve written about my bean visions here in these columns before. Our favorite retired clinical psychologist, Dr. Jerry, tells me not to worry.

This past week I had a bean vision in an upstairs apartment near the state Capital building in downtown Denver. It was the day after Thanksgiving and the traffic was not too bad. Culley Jane and I drove there from our suburban home to check up on our friend Alexis who had just had hip surgery related to a car accident she had a few years ago that wasn’t her fault. We found a parking spot a block away from the Capital, walked across the street, entered a code to get into the apartment building and went upstairs.

Alexis has three cats. Two hid and the third, a Russian Blue, stared at us like she was unimpressed.

Alexis was getting around better on her crutches. Her pain level was no more than what a single tab of Tylenol 3 could handle.

We drank tea and started reminiscing and laughing about some of the times we’d had together in the old days.

That’s when I had a bean vision. The Russian Blue seemed to notice, too, that Leibniz was there in the room with us as well.

Leibniz was a 17^th century German philosopher. He invented a language called calculus to communicate a different way of looking at reality, like when somebody realizes that the world does not fall away at the horizon, or that it is we who are going around the sun.

Leibniz said there’s no such thing as empty space. He was called a dangerous quack because that was not how things looked to anybody with a pair of eyes. Things are defined by the empty space between them. The world looks like this or that with nothing in between. But Leibniz famously said, responding to Lock’s empiricism, that “appearances can be deceiving,” (or something like that.)

Some old ideas, like going back to the days of Democrates, die hard, like the idea of atoms, from the Greek words “a” (not or can’t) and “thom” (to cut). Even by the time I was in college the biophysics profs were still saying that, ultimately, it all came down to tiniest particles separated by empty space. Maybe they’re still saying it in schools while the whole quantum revolution is playing out in what was once thought to be empty space where nothing real existed.

Maybe Alexis saw empty space as something when she was under for the hip surgery. If it was possible, she’d be the one to do it. She’s just that way.

Alexis and my oldest daughter first met and became friends during their college days in Denver. That’s how I first met her, when I was working as an over-the-road trucker and took days off in Denver.

Alexis grew up in Omaha. My daughter was a little girl in western Nebraska, but because of my profession we moved around a lot.

My daughter was going to be an opera singer performing at the Met. Alexis was going to become a lawyer fighting for Justice in the Courts. Both their paths wound up veering off in other directions.

We did some things together whenever I was in town… political discoursing with their young crowd of college age friends; musical jamming in an old warehouse basement, me, an old-timer, on my silver jazz flute.

The three of us went to a Catholic Bingo Hall one night and I got pissed at Alexis for something she said about the Pope in such a Catholic place where you could never be sure who might me listening. I can’t remember what she said. We laugh about it now.

You’d have to be familiar with Colfax Avenue — where Kerouac hung out when he was in Denver — to get a really good picture of those two having the grandest time parading down the legendary street past the pawn shops and dive bars, street corner poets, the Fillmore, Pete’s Kitchen.

In their hands held high on their way to the Capitol to make their case they proudly carried homemade protest signs:

One said: “NO MORE GRUMPY PEOPLE.”

The other said: “CALL YOUR MOTHER.”

When people on the street asked them what they were protesting, they’d point to their signs and say: “Grumpy people who never call their mother. There oughta to be a law.”

When I saw what the two of them were up to, I thought it was great and one day asked if I could join them and they said “sure, love it!” and they helped me make my sign.

In Calligraphic haiku-like swirls of purple-rich paints, they wrote what I wanted to say on my sign and off we went on down Colfax Avenue.

We hadn’t gone a couple blocks when I was approached by a woman coming out of a liquor store with a bottle of cheap wine in a brown paper sack. She wrinkled her face up into a curious look, her colorless lips mouthing the words on my sign… THERE’S  NO  SUCH  THING  AS   EMPTY   SPACE.

“Mmm,” she said… then after thinking about it some more said: “Obviously, you’ve never met my ex-husband.”

At that very instant, twenty some years ago in front of a liquor store on Colfax Avenue, I had one of my bean visions. I realized that none of what was happening would be happening the way it was happening had Leibniz not been there too.

Then last week it happened again.

The other two cats came out of hiding and were looking around.