Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

When I was young, I wrote like a horse chasing a carrot — imagining what I’d say on the Johnny Carson Show.

Johnny died before I got there, but my wife, the novelist Culley Jane Carson, reminds me that I’ve made it to the Culley Jane Carson Show!

When I was young, I wrote to tell the world what I knew for sure and the world would change its ways.

When I was young, I took off because that’s what writers did, they took off, chasing the carrot.

I wonder now: Would I have done things differently had I known then what I know now, that the carrot was a spot on the Culley Jane Carson Show?

Instead of Johnny shining the spotlight on me in front of his nationwide television audience, Culley Jane shines the spotlight on my final drafts, looking for flaws, spots on the floor — an “its” instead of “it’s” their, they’re; tense, POV; dangling participles, whatever they are. It makes her happy when the floor is polished, revealing something good. It makes me happy when she writes something good, too.

The Culley Jane Carson Show could be turned into a daily television soap opera about two writers from another age who meet on a dating site after they’re retired and get married and live in the suburbs of an American city on a quiet cul-de-sac street an easy drive to shopping and family. Maybe call it “The Benny and Abby Show.”

Abby’s always up first and has coffee ready, a cat on her lap. Benny comes downstairs, following the other cat. Glancing at the news, Benny can feel that gnawing, familiar tightness in his stomach and chest. Clinical anxiety. Like feeling like the walls protecting them are about to come crashing down. Bombs away. End of the American Century. The rise of Eurasia and the Global South — payback time for the crime of IMF “conditionalities.”

Or maybe a way is found to cooperate and the walls simply dissolve. We join BRICS. A tunnel beneath the Bering Sea. Fusion. Universal air conditioning. A chicken in every pot.

Benny relaxes. One of the cats jumps up on his lap. “You know,” he says to Abby, “I think I’ll write my column this week about the Johnny Carson Show. I’ve been thinking about how different my life would have been had I gotten on the Johnny Carson Show and become famous and gotten into public relations and became a billionaire writing ad copy for Trump and Roy Cohn’s other clients. They’d tell me where to put my money. I could buy whatever I wanted. I’d have more money than the entire town where I grew up, enough to be a Fortune Magazine top ten philanthropist and financier of political campaigns and get invited to celebrity events where underage East European girls are paraded around… Can you imagine it? Can you imagine how I’d be feeling right now scanning the news if that was me? Sitting on my golden throne thinking like the walls are getting ready to come crashing down… waking up one morning and I’m old and mortal!!! …”

Abby just listens. She knows many of Benny’s good columns started out as hyperactive, ADHD rants. “Don’t dangle your participles,” she says as he gets up and goes to his room to write.