Our Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

The Newtonian universe next to my desk where I go to work to stir things up.

It's Off to Work We Go

I don’t know what you call them – those glass, fluid-filled bubble-like things with tiny snowflake-like particles floating around haphazardly when you shake it in perfect imitation of a Newtonian universe.

And then we just sit there watching the particles settle into entropic motionlessness waiting for the hand of God to stir things up again.

I bought one at the Savoy Museum during our recent trip to Europe. It was one of the very few souvenir-like things I bought there. I bought a Heidelberg University t-shirt in Germany, a fingernail clipper in Switzerland and the snowflake bubble in France.

The bubble traveled with us on our plane flight back to Colorado and to its new home on the other side of an ocean.

Like our cats, it has its own place now where it can watch me when I go to work at my desk in the mornings.

I don’t have to go to work at any particular time anymore now that I’m retired with enough -- a house with a big back yard and married to a retired professor who is also a writer, so she understands why I still have to go to work every day.

I sleep without an alarm clock next to the bed.

My day starts when I wake up.

First thing, coffee for me and tea for Culley Jane. She likes to read the Denver Post first thing in the morning and then tells me about what’s on the front page… mostly stories about shootings and anger.

I step outside onto the back patio to check out the weather. A present wind flows down off the mountains. It’s autumn. Oak leaves fall to the ground, where they settle, waiting.

When we were young we were told that if we got up in the morning and laced our boots and went off to work even when we were hung over and didn’t feel like it and did a good job that we had a right to expect a better fate than oak leaves on the ground in autumn… just waiting.

Time to go to work.

I stare at a blank screen on my computer.

Out of the corner of my eye I notice the snowflake bubble, white flakes settled to the bottom.

I shake it up into a swirling fury of thoughts in motion.

I start writing.