Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

It’s Wednesday morning and I have not yet written a single word for this week’s Our Story column. So busy with other stuff. Deadline is 10 p.m. tonight. I don’t know what to write about. Everything's in flux. But I know I’ll write something. I always have and I feel like writing this morning.

I slept good last night. Culley Jane had coffee ready when I got up. Then downstairs to my office -- the World Headquarters of Westphalia Publishing.

A cat on the windowsill watches me. The room is silent. The world waits. I look around. Parting the curtain, I see that yesterday’s dark clouds are slowly rising above the far-off horizon ahead, revealing an overwhelmingly clear blue sky beyond. We’re changing. We’re not the same anymore. We’re no longer the director. The weight of the stress of having to manage everybody’s business, their every move and mood; of having to tell everybody what they have to do, or else, was being lifted. We’re becoming friends again with Russia, like we were back during our Civil War when the Czar sent war ships into New York and San Francisco harbors as a warning to England to back off, stay out of it. We’re becoming just neighbors again. We’ll build a tunnel beneath the Bering Sea so we can visit one another by car… and the Israeli Likud is on the way out and we’ll build the Ben-Gurion Canal. I can relax. There won't be a nuclear exchange. Hiroshima will always be remembered as the last. We’re stepping back from the final brink.

I take a deep breath and look around the house. It’s a mess. It’s been a busy week, and the house has been neglected and it’s a mess, like the morning after a rowdy party… clothes on the floor, papers strewn about, dishes in the sink… our Venezuelan friends are still here, but it's still a mess, struggling to find any kind of work to pay the rent.

I recall the best poem I ever wrote. I wrote it back during my on-the-road Kerouac days. It’s called Zen:

Wash the dishes

One by one

And before you know it

The last one’s done

There’s still so much to do, one column at a time.