My mother passed away last week, last Thursday evening just as the earth’s dark shadow was eclipsing a brilliant full moon. Culley Jane and I were watching the celestial event from the backyard of our home in Colorado when the call came.

Mom was 96 years old.

My brothers and sister still live way up north in Michigan’s “Upper Peninsula” where we all grew up. They were with her the day of the eclipse. My dad was, too. They’d been married for 79 years. They’d been high school sweethearts and got married after dad got back home after the war.

We were the Gauthier family on West “D” Street in Iron Mountain, a small town at the edge of the woods. In the beginning, in the 50s, father worked in a factory and mother was always home. Later on, as I was heading out into the world, dad used his GI Bill benefits to start taking college classes and eventually became the town’s 3^rd grade teacher. Mom took night classes and became a VA nurse, one year winning the prestigious “Nurse of the Year” award at the Iron Mountain VA hospital.

It’s a 1,200-mile drive from Colorado to northern Michigan. The last time I saw mom was earlier this summer. I sat with her on the couch at the assisted living facility apartment where she and dad have lived for the past three years. For brief moments, she recognized me. I’m 78, the oldest. She reached out to touch me. “It’s really you,” she said, like she knew I was ok. Then she sighed and closed her eyes. As long as she knows that everybody is ok, then she’s ok. It’s just the way she was.

Of her four children, I was always the one who was taking off. She would cry and make me promise to call and to write letters and to let me know that I could always come back home. Dad might piss and moan about some of the decisions I made in my life — like quitting a job with a future and the promise of rewards to hitchhike around the country like a Depression-era hobo — but as long as I was ok, mom was ok and didn’t have to worry.

Much of the next day following the eclipse I was on the phone with my sister, who’s in charge of handling the “arrangements.” Dad told her he wants all four of us kids to be with him at the services, which would take place in two weeks.

I waited for a couple days before I called him. He was having lots of visitors and I wanted to wait for things to calm down first. He had new hearing aids from the VA. When he answered the phone he could hear me good.

“You’ll be here for the services, right?” he said.

I told him I planned to drive up there early, at least a week before the services, so we’d have plenty of time to bull shit about stuff, maybe take a ride up to the old hunting camp. Culley Jane and the others could fly in later.

He asked me if I was still driving my old Subaru. “It’s twelve hundred miles,” he said. “Two-lane roads getting across Wisconsin. I’d hate to see you break down at a time like this. I want all four of you kids here for the services.”

I told him we had a new Toyota pick-up with under 20,000 miles on it. No problem.

Then I asked him: “How are you doin’?”

He took a moment to think about it, then said: “Ok, I guess, all things considered. How ‘bout you?”

“I’m ok,” I said.

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 one day 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 popped up 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, “Wha' d’ 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 Hapsburgs,” he said. “I like your history columns. I loved the line about former kings hallucinating about 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 remember what’s possible, that’s when I know what to do with my day.