Thursday's Columns
October 9, 2025
Our
Story
by
Lawrence Abby Gauthier
ace reporter
The Westphalia Periodic News
Etymology of the word, “Decide.” From the Latin words “de,” meaning “off,” and “caedere,” meaning “cut.”
After waking in the morning, a typical day begins with a decision… should I get up? Then coffee, with or without? Should I go to the gym today or start raking autumn leaves? Pants or jeans. Shave or not. What to write about. Do we need anything from the store? It can be overwhelming. That’s when I got a big idea.
It started as a small idea… I got to thinking about my life looking down from high above and could see how profoundly it had been shaped by simple decisions I’d made in the past – like the time 55 years ago I decided to get drunk with my Bohemian buddies instead of going to work.
Had I gone to work that night, I’d probably still be living way up north in the U.P., in the old home town, Iron Mountain, where my family had been for generations, both the Swedish side and the French-Canadiens. Maybe I’d still be married to the Italian princess from the North Side. We went steady all through high school — the cheerleader and the halfback. We got married the summer before our senior year at Northern Michigan University, in Marquette, on the southern shore of Lake Superior, not far from Iron Mountain.
The wedding was a big event in town, when all the French-Canadien and Italian Catholics got together in the same church and reception hall where the Swedish Lutheran ladies from my mother’s side had laid out a big spread.
Back at school, we lived on campus in married housing with other young married couples nearing the end of their college years. Some were facing Vietnam. I had a 4-F deferment for an old high school football injury, so we were freer to choose our future than many of our neighbors in married housing.
I had a part-time job at night mopping cafeteria floors. A big winter storm was blowing in off of Lake Superior. Bundled up to brave the cold, I probably told her something like: “You’ve got early classes tomorrow. I’ll probably be the only one showing up for work tonight, probably work late. Don’t wait up for me.” All not true, of course. I had already called in sick to work.
Trudging through the wind and icy snow towards Pap’s Pub on 4th street, I steered clear of the cafeteria building so nobody’d see I wasn’t really sick.
A couple of my Bohemian buddies were already at the bar when I got there. They were not like my neighbors in married housing. Nor were they like the hippies or the revolutionaries cropping up on college campuses in the 60s. They were more like… well, Bohemians. They dressed in long overcoats off the rack at Goodwill. They used big words. They gathered in corners at parties, discussing philosophy and meaning, observing, taking notes.
All my Bohemian buddies in college wanted to be writers, and I did, too, ever since I heard the Beatle’s Paperback Writer at the pool hall in high school.
I was conflicted.
I was getting close to graduating with a teaching certificate and a degree in “social studies.” My wife and I both had relatives on the school board back home in Iron Mountain. It would be easy to get a job there. I could even coach football part-time if I wanted to. We’d build a house on Spring Lake. Kids and Little League. Maybe run for a local office. Pillars of the community. Carrying on.
But I was conflicted.
I was floating down a lazy river leading me right back home to where everything was as familiar as the taste of salt.
But writers are supposed to “take off,” aren’t they?
Pretty soon the famous Professor John Watanen blew in through the front door of Pap’s Pub in a cloud of snow. He was a big, bearded Scandinavian with a big voice that provoked attention. He taught modern American literature — Kerouac, Hemingway, Steinbeck and all those other guys who took off before they were famous, as if no woman ever did.
Everybody called him “the Professor,” even his wife, a professor of mathematics, called him “the Professor.”
The Professor was known for taking a special interest in students who said they wanted to be writers, like me and my Bohemian buddies. He didn’t mark us down for skipping classes. He joined us regularly at Pap’s Pub.
He bought a round for the table and listened to me crying in my beer, moaning about my conflicted situation. I was married and had to make a living, but I didn’t think I could ever become a writer if I took a teaching job back home in Iron Mountain. I couldn’t imagine there’d be anything to write about there that wasn’t already common knowledge.
The Professor said he might have a solution. “You could become a newspaper reporter,” he said. “They move around a lot. Maybe your wife would be happy to follow you. You could learn a lot about writing as a newspaper reporter, like about deadlines, when you have to go to work even though you don’t feel like it. Lots of famous writers started out that way.”
“How do I do it?” I said.
“Well,” he said, “the president of the Michigan Press Association is a friend of mine… I could give him a call next week…”
“Where’s he live? What’s his name?”
I jotted the information down on the back of a Pap’s Pub matchbook cover, and, with that, was out the door and into the storm, plowing through windswept drifts of snow up to my knees towards the highway leading out of town, where I stuck out my thumb like a rabbit on the run.
For days, nobody knew where I was. The State Police were notified. But I got my first job as a newspaper reporter, at the Hillsdale Daily News, on the Michigan/Indiana border, where lots of Amish live.
After reviewing the record, the marriage was officially annulled by the Bishop of the Diocese of Marquette.
So, today, I don’t live in a small town at the edge of the woods, where the horizon is obscured by rows of pine. I live out West, where the High Plains of America come up against the mountains and the horizon is as far as you can see in any direction. I live in a castle with a stone tower from which to observe the advance of my enemies, slowly creeping across the treeless landscape, in full view, affording plenty of time to initiate counter-offensives before it’s too late.
All because one night a long time ago I decided to get drunk with my Bohemian buddies instead of going to work.