Thursdays Columns

October 12, 2023

Our Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

I need to lay down sentences fast. In a couple of hours later today (Wednesday, October 4, 2023) there’s going to be some kind of national emergency alert system test and there are people on the internet who say it’s going to be the End of the World. I’ve lived with, thought and written about the End of the World most all of my life.

The Dominicans who ruled over my elementary school years, shrouded in Manichean darkness and bleached whites, made it sound as inevitable as next week and that it would be my fault. But right now, I want to write about the Beginning of the World and maybe I don’t have much time.

In the Beginning I became something other than what I was because I decided on my own to do it. There’s a lot of pressure on people to not know about this… that they have the power to be. It’s not something I learned growing up in a small town where everybody was related and roles were assigned at birth. It’s something I learned during my “On the Road” years, in 1976, in a small college town way up north along the southern shores of Lake Superior, where I first met Eric Chaet, who had just published his first book and our paths chanced to cross.

Eric had probably already figured it out for himself and was merely passing the information along to me -- that you don’t have to be published in New York, London or Paris to be a writer. Without being preachy about it, he let me know that I had the right and sovereign power to make that decision on my own. Besides, the system was haunted by spooks. The Church Committee had recently been uncovering the CIA’s role in domestic propaganda, funneled through family connections in the world of big-time publishing, shaping the contours of thought.

Eric and I don’t remember the day I became a writer the same way. Of course not. To him, it was just another chance encounter out on the road; another forgotten day from years ago, like most all days become. But to me, it was the day I became a writer. So, to me, it’s like it happened yesterday, all the details in sharp focus, right down to the color of the waitress’s dress.

Maybe one day Eric will write a column for the Westphalia Periodic News giving his side of the story.

The way I remember it, he came over to my booth in a back corner of the old workingman’s cafe and we got to talking. I asked him if he was a writer. I remember him saying something like he was lots of things and was just passing through. I think he said he had been teaching at a small college I’d never heard of and was on his way to something else. He’d grown up on the South Side of Chicago, known as a rough part of town. He said he’d just published his first book, which caught my attention.

I told him my story and he said he’d like to see what I was doing. So I ran back to my room and came back with a pile of what I’d been doing, pounding away on the old Smith-Corona at all hours of the day and night, writing the Great American Novel in a rush to get it published in New York so I could be a writer and get on with my life.

I remember him asking if he could take a few pages back to his motel room, where he’d be spending the night. He said he’d take a look at them and we could meet again in the morning to talk about it, same time, same café.

I was on pins and needles all day anxiously anticipating what a real writer -- a published one -- was going to tell me about what I was doing. That night I drank "altar wine" (MD 20-20) with my Depression-era hobo friends out back on the rear fire escape of an old hotel by the railroad yards. I howled at the moon, trying to get my courage up.

The next morning, after a sleepless night, I showed up at the café first and waited.

Stella, the locally famous waitress who handed out daily Bible tracts with the check, said I looked terrible.

Eric came through the front door and sat looking at me from across the table in our booth. He had turned the handful of scrambled sheets of paper into a neat pile and laid them down on the table.

“You can write,” he said, “and you’ll be a writer when you say you are.”

Stella appeared out of nowhere to take our orders and to chat a little. Eric said he’d be taking off after breakfast. She handed him that day’s Bible tract. He told her that he’d grown up Jewish, but was currently unsettled in his beliefs, which prompted Stella to give a little sermon on the topic of absolute certainty.

I felt like I was in a church -- a tiny little church thrown together somewhere out there On the Road; just the three of us and the smell of coffee at the northern edge.

After Stella left, Eric turned his attention back to me.

“So,” he asked me again, like he’d done the day before when we first met, “are you a writer?”

Without thinking about it, I said: “Yes.”

“Are you certain?”

“Yes,” I said.

When I got back to my room in the old hotel, the Smith-Corona on the table in front of the window with a view of Lake Superior was waiting for me.

I reached into my pants pocket. I pulled out that day’s Bible tract from Stella. It was a commentary on the opening lines of John: “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was made Flesh.”

It was so obvious!

Why had I not seen it before?

(to be continued…)

(Postscript)

Two days after some people said was going to be the End of the World, and three days before it WAS for many in the Holy Land, I received an email from Eric. Attached to it was his latest poem:

NO ESCAPE FROM POLITICS
by Eric Chaet

October 6, 2023
 
There's no escape from politics
willing or not, aware or not ---
every infant's first breath of atmosphere
is accompanied by some citizen's care
or inability to care
already involved in the struggle for authority & power
at least to become free to do what one would
in the midst of others whose struggle
is for more authority & power than that.
 
So the child is guided & misguided
in person, text, & telecommunicated messages.
Neighborhood, city, province, nation ---
& other nations, too ---
our politics bleed into one another & are one.
 
When I say my time is too valuable to campaign
for the privilege of arguing with other campaigners
while history's patterns --- stylistically altered --- repeat
& what is decent & wholesome is corrupted again ---
til one more catastrophe ends the cycle ---
I don't mean I'm not competing with the winners & losers
& all those pretending they're not involved ---
while, vote or no, they buy this not that
& trim their sails with the prevailing rhetoric & policies.
 
I know poets are considered impotent ---
but I'm hereby & always
competing with what is considered so & inevitable ---
for influence, authority, power ---
so the effects I want occur, not those opposing.
 
You are, too --- realizing it or not ---
willing or not, effective or not
maybe in symbiosis with me, or against.