Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

What to do with my day?

Usually, that’s my first thought after coffee in the morning — what to do with my day? What chores can’t be ignored any longer? What to write? It used to be what to do with my life? Now it’s with my day.

I check the appointment calendar on the iPhone in my mind. If I’m lucky, I won’t have to think, but just do. But some days, like one day this past week, it’s a blank slate… and that’s when I feel an emotional, almost primaeval need to call somebody on the telephone — to just talk.

It doesn’t matter much what we talk about or who I call; maybe one of the kids, or a brother or sister up north in the U.P., or friends scattered around the country, and the world, actually. With WhatsApp, I could call Boo in France or Andreas in Ontario or Jagdish in India for free.

I decided to call Etter in Detroit.

Etter and I were friends in college at Northern Michigan University in the late 60’s. He was from an upper middle-class suburb of Detroit and I was from a small town at the edge of the woods in the U.P. Other than the fact that we had both grown up in the State of Michigan at about the same time, the only other thing we had in common was that we both dreamed of becoming a famous writer and getting on the Johnny Carson Show.

After graduating, we took off down different paths, not hearing a word from, or about, one another for 50 years. Then one day just before Covid he appears in the “People You Might Know” section of my Facebook page. He was in Detroit, back to where he had started. I was in Denver, either coming or going. Pretty soon we were regularly talking to one another on the phone.

At the time, he was still working on his novel. I had kind of put my novel aside to incorporate a publishing company and write a weekly newspaper column for The Westphalia Periodic News.

Through Covid and into the now, we talked about our lives and emerging ideas, a little too often while we were both drinking whiskey late at night.

Last month, Westphalia published his first novel, “The Young Maestro, by Marc Etter.” Available on Amazon for a pricey $14.95.  

Whenever I call him and he answers he always says, “Whatd’ you know man?” and I say “What’s goin’ on?”

A couple days ago, he said: “I really liked your column last week.”

I couldn’t remember right off what I had written about. “What did I write about?” I asked him.

“About the Hapsburg’s,” he said. “I like your history columns. I loved the line about kings hallucinating a paradise lost.”

We talked about a few other things before hanging up to get back to our separate worlds, his in Detroit, the “Motor City,” and mine here in Denver, the “Mile High City.”

“Ok,” I thought to myself. “I’ll write another historical column, maybe like something about the lives lived by famous writers before they were famous.”

I have to be careful with historical columns. Nothing is as it appears to be at first glance, the starting point of Leibnitzean metaphysics. To write history, you have to go down into the weeds of the thing to come up with the roots — the means of production, the tools being used at any particular time in measured space to survive on a planet in orbit around a sun, what Marx called “material dialectics.”

I need to come right out and say it: I have a Marxian view of history, which doesn’t make me a Marxist.

Marx said that more powerful than reigning monarchs, popes, mob bosses, or weather, a culture is shaped by its means of production. I imagine how different the world will look fifty years from now depending on how quickly we develop thermonuclear energy, enough for everybody for all time, enough to create an atmosphere on Mars if that’s what we decide to do.

When I can see what’s possible, that’s when I know what to do with my day.