Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

I have restless leg syndrome. I’ve had it since I was a kid. So I spend a lot of time in the space between being awake and being asleep. Many of my best ideas have been formed there. I think that’s where the thing I like to call my Bean Visions comes from, when the entire story is seen from beginning to end all at once in an instant.

A couple weeks ago, I had a Bean Vision that came to me while lying half awake and half asleep next to Culley Jane in our bed. With my eyes half closed, I saw a round, papery gray beehive hanging from an eave. I decided to investigate and looked inside. It was a madcap scene of vibrating insects all crawling over one another to get to the head of the line, where the Queen Bee reigned, deep inside, making rules which all obeyed.

I decided to save the image as “the hive” in the file in my mind labeled “Bean Visions” and closed my eyes. Perhaps it would come back to me at a later time.

And it did! Last Saturday morning, getting ready to start work on this week’s Our Story column, it came back to me – the image of the hive.

I formed an hypothesis (although grammatically disputed, I like to use “an” instead of “a” before “hypothesis” because it’s easier to say out loud).

I hypothesized that the unannounced reappearance of the image of the hive was somehow connected to what had happened the night before.

The night before, Culley Jane and I watched an old movie on our new television with a million channels all vying for attention. I had the clicker. Scrolling through the endless list, I almost clicked on an old Woody Allan flick, Annie Hall, but moved on, briefly hovering over Casablanca, or anything based on a Neil Simon play.

I kept wishing I could know what I was looking for, and then it happened — His Girl Friday, a 1940 adaptation of Ben Hecht’s 1928 play, The Front Page. I’d seen it before. Years ago. It’s about the powerful lure of living the exciting life of a big city newspaper reporter.

In the movie, Hildy, played by Rosalind Russell, is torn between two worlds — a quiet, comfortable life as a wife with kids and a husband; or the madcap existence of a big city newspaper reporter, adrenaline, like an animal on the trail of the next big thing — the sounds of a newsroom nearing deadline… secret communications.

Watching the movie, I identified with Hildy. The movie brought back lots of memories of when I was a big city newspaper reporter... the chase, the almost erotic obsession with wanting to see what was going on behind the curtain.

I was still feeling it the next morning when I sat down to start work on this week’s Our Story column. I felt like a reporter. It’s a reporter’s job to know what’s going on, and I was raised to do a good job.

The public gets its news filtered through bureaucracies with margins and bottom lines, but reporters get their news from sources who trust and speak to them from deep inside.

News Flash!

Just then, just like that, snap, the image of the hive reappeared, but this time I noticed tiny little wingless beings, with minds of their own, floating and flocking about in patterns above the periphery of the hive. I recognized them. They were tinier than anything with mass, but I knew them, fleckets (a made-up word) of light. They had the weight of a good idea. They were my sources.

I was surprised by how rapidly their numbers had been increasing. They were attracting crowds. They preached a faith recently thought to be nearing extinction, a faith in the Idea of Progress. And they were knocking at the castle’s door.

Some years ago, some years after things in general had started going downhill, I made up a name for those kinds of beings — those people who still believed in the Idea of Progress. I called them larouchians, a kind of clever take on Swift’s Lilliputians. Actually, Swift was a larouchian, too. He was an ally of Leibniz, who first came up with the Idea of Progress in the late 17^th century when he said we live in the best of all possible worlds, not the best because we get led astray and confused and lose sight of what's possible. (Culley Jane said this last sentence is confusing. I can see why.)

I know some larouchians here in the Denver area. There’s Ralph the Economist, for instance. He started studying economics after he lost all his money in 2008. He quickly realized that in the real world, graphs of Progress do not correlate with graphed levels of money supply ordered by the Queen Bee deep inside...

And then there’s David Dvorkin. He came of age when the Idea of Progress was at its zenith. He was 24 years old when he went to work for NASA in 1967, just before all hell broke loose. He wrote a book about it. I decided to give him a call.

(to be continued…)