Matthew Gallaway

Dahlias for Dada

Like many non-heterosexuals -- at least of my generation -- I think it's sometimes difficult to find things to talk about with my father. He (like many of his generation) grew up in the most severe period of the Dark Ages -- a period extending from roughly the Second World War to the current era -- a time when homosexuality was not only taboo, it was barely even acknowledged, and masculine/feminine stereotypes hardened in the United States and were exported around the world for mass consumption. As a result, homosexuality tends to be something that's 'accepted' with a lot work, but never really understood or embraced.
So we sometimes struggle to find common ground. In my own case, I can't pretend to share my father's political views and I'm no longer really interested in sports, unless I happen to catch a game or two of the Penguins when they make the Stanley Cup finals. That's why I've been so happy that my father and I discovered gardening around the same time, roughly ten years ago, when we each moved into our new houses.
My father spends hours in the garden now, planting and trimming and weeding and arranging, all the sorts of things that all gardeners do. He and my mother (who has less patience for the tedium of gardening) moved into a house that already had a beautiful infrastructure, which he has managed to maintain as the years have passed while putting his own signature onto the landscape.
So now in lieu of politics or sports, we discuss the garden; what's thriving this year (we both have a fondness for certain types of sedum, and he has a real talent for roses) and what isn't (the clematis).
In this way a new and better relationship is born when an old one has been set aside.

A Caturday Conversation

Dante: Can I tell you something important?
Zephyr: I guess so.
Dante: So I was having this dream last night and --
Zephyr: OMG YAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWNNNNN...
Dante: What was I saying?
Zephyr: I can't remember.

On the C-Train Uptown (A Short Story)

On the C-train uptown tonight, I found a seat because it was late and the car was empty.
Then it got crowded at 14th Street and some big huge guy squeezed into a six-inch gap between me and the person next to me. It was hot and I was annoyed that our arms and legs were touching and I gave him dirty looks. Thankfully he got off at 34th Street, but then some other guy leaned over me to look at the subway map, and he kept leaning and looking, until he had to reach out and trace over the line with his finger. I gave him some dirty looks, too, and sighed heavily.
I wished that I lived in the West Village, the end.

The Birch Tree in Late Spring

The branches of the birch tree hang off the trunk and sway back and forth in the breeze like the strands of a wet mop, or maybe those thin sponges in an automatic car wash.
The leaves soak up the late afternoon light and turn bronze against the sky.
Some leaves remain in the shadows, and seem to hang overhead like a dark cloud.

Light Boxes (Shane Jones)

I just finished Light Boxes, a short and amazingly textured novel by Shane Jones about a small town whose inhabitants decide to wage war on February. In addition to a period of time -- namely the month we all know and dread -- February in this book is cold and sad and indefinite in duration, and may or may not also be a god or a misunderstood man, an outcast who terrorizes the townspeople with snow and ice (and moss!), leading to the end of flight (paper airplanes, balloons, and kites) and more sinisterly to the kidnapping and murder of children.   
The prose (which is beautiful) tends to be simple and lyrical, similar to a fable or fairy tale, but is peppered with a perfect array of post-modern allusions and devices (some of them quite funny, e.g., references to Charles Shultz, David Foster Wallace, and 'the creator of MySpace') that allows the story to effectively transcend such traditional structures.
The narrative is rich with themes and motifs that (again, unlike a traditional fairy tale or fable, but more like life in the modern world) are presented without easy resolution. A few I detected include: love and the end of love (and life and the end of life); the interplay between sadness and creation; the costs and benefits religious dogma and war (including technology and violence); the sense of knowing someone intimately and not knowing them at all. 
To read Light Boxes is like having a dream (and one of the miracles of this book is that it feels like the reader's dream, not Jones' or even one of the character's) in the psychoanalytical sense, i.e., a dream in which your unconscious communicates with you via an array of signs and symbols (many surreal), but the exact meaning of which the reader (i.e., the dreamer) must work to interpret. As with most dreams, I felt like there were no right or wrong answers to these questions, but that I ended up with a strong intuition about life, and the many directions it may or may not take.

There Are Cities Beneath the City: Sometimes They Are Exposed and Leave Us Astonished

Lately they've been reconstructing a portion of Park Avenue not far from where I work. The sidewalk is usually about a foot above the steel i-beams, which led to me to wonder why there was space underneath, and moreover space that was bordered by old clay-fired bricks (the most exquisite kind of brick, as all aficionados of the construction material know).
I estimated that there are thousands of layers beneath the city, some populated by people we have never seen. They are as unaware of our existence as we are of theirs.
Days arrive when the children of this subterranean cities look up and see the light streaming down through the gaps in the plywood sky. They ask their parents where this light is coming from; the parents shrug, and tell their children that these are merely gaps in the moving clouds.

The Glendorn Diaries (Part 7): The Emotional Life of Ferns

At the bottom of the mountain, I ended up in a glade of ferns. (We have this same variety in our garden, but the exact name escapes me at the moment.) For several minutes I pondered the serene beauty and tranquility of the site. 
I thought to myself, 'If I'm ever reincarnated as a fern, I would be happy to live here.'
But then I wondered if all the ferns were as happy as they appeared. Perhaps they were miserable; perhaps like people who are crowded together in one place, they get on each others' nerves and complain and gossip about who is or isn't attractive or who is being a pig or who should really get off his or her ass for a change.
The blue and yellow wildflowers, however, were completely at ease with one another.

The Glendorn Diaries (Part 6): Coming Down the Mountain (One of Many Children)

The top of the mountain was littered with broken logs, placed haphazardly in the grass like corpses after a battle. There was a ruined quality to the scene, which (i.e., the ruins of nature, and in contrast to the ruins of humanity) are never very appealing.
I was more taken with the view of the blue mountains of Pennsylvania.
There was a hut nearby, which was for the most part unmaintained, although it wasn't falling over, either. I wondered what it would be like to live here, and knew that I would only last a few hours. The modern era is all about specialization and I have no ability to survive in the forest, despite some ability to hike through the trees.
I started walking down the mountain, and thought about the Jane's Addiction song of the same (or similar) name; in college when they were just getting big, I was obsessed for a little while. I saw them in concert at the University of Maryland after their second album came out; to get tickets my friend Steve and I had to pay $60 each to a scalper, which at the time seemed exorbitant, the most I had ever paid to see anything. But it was worth it: the band was at the height of their power, and displayed a kind of decadent authority that to my mind recalled Led Zeppelin in the 1970s (not that I had seen them, of course). I remember how in the first song I fell into the mosh pit and someone (accidentally) kicked off my glasses; luckily I was able to reach down and pick them up off the floor before they were broken. After this, I tied them to my head with an elastic band so that they wouldn't fall off, and jumped back into the most pit with renewed (aesthetic) fury: it was probably the best mosh pit I ever experienced, a tide of bodies surging back and forth with a certain violence but respect, so that you felt tethered by the music to those nearby as you crashed into them, but never threatened or injured, as sometimes happened in the worst kind of mosh pits, where the rules of engagement dissolved into a more harrowing anarchy. 
The path down the slope was steep but beautifully lit.
I paused to examine the rotting, moss-covered stump of a fallen tree.
I didn't stay too long, though: the bugs were attacking, prodding me to return to the path that would take me back to where I wanted to go.

World Cup Caturday

Zephyr: I remember playing soccer when I was younger -- it's so much better than football.
Elektra: This World Cup game is really interesting. Zephyr: I will kill you if you make fun of 'le foot.'
Elektra: Is there a fly on my neck?
Dante: Is it time to put on the air conditioning?
Zephyr: Wtf is air-conditioning.
Dante: Wtf is soccer?
Elektra: Wtf is the United States?
Zephyr: GOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In the Weeds: Cascading Campanula

Click through to the Awl for my latest 'In the Weeds' on cascading campanula!