Matthew Gallaway

Spring Cleaning and the Metaphorical Box

1. As it often does here, spring arrived under a shroud of rain and fog. 

2. Some people, tired of protesting the broken subway system and broken internet, turned into snowdrops and assembled next to the path.

3. While others, myself included, spent the week cleaning up (or deleting) our social media platforms. 

4. I went for the cleaning-up option, which has been a daunting project, even though I don't do much outside of this blog and the occasional tweet. 

5. I used to be a LOT more active, however, which I realized as I watched ten thousand Facebook updates (most from between 2009-2012) evaporate.

6. As much as I understand the impulse to delete accounts for political and personal reasons, I decided on a more moderate approach. There's a lot about social media that I've enjoyed, and I don't want to erase everything. I went through a similar process when my parents sold the house I grew up in: seeing the piles of letters and schoolwork that had accumulated over the years, I realized that there was really no point hauling around more than I could fit into a small box. 

7. It's the same approach I want to bring to my online past. I look at things I've posted and ask myself if I want to keep this item in my metaphorical box. Most of the time the answer is no. It feels good to delete.  

8. I think it's taken society some time to figure out that, despite the unlimited amount of space on the internet, there's no reason to use as much of it as possible, or to treat it like a cesspool of random thoughts. 

9. As with so much, the natural world offers the best approach: we need to let things die so that new things can grow. 

Let's Be Flowers Under This Blanket of Snow

1. The snow, once I stopped complaining about it, was quite beautiful. It arrived with some force (not pictured) and retreated with grace and dignity. 2. Defying all expectations, the flowers didn't seem too bothered by the cold or the snow. They were prepared for anything.  3. Still, it was difficult to believe that it was late March 2018, a year that will go down in history as one of the hottest on record (but not as hot as what's coming). 4. Sometimes the park seems like one of those magical places you find in fantasy novels -- often inhabited by elves and sacred trees -- where you find calm and immortality but also a creeping despair as news of the world's destruction arrives by way of visitors from the outside. Soon enough, one of the trees gets sick and it's time for the forces of good to venture out and stop whatever evil is killing everything. 5. Unfortunately the real world is more complicated than any novel (except Infinite Jest). 6. I'm not an advocate of "hope," which too often seems to fall into the same category of denial as "thoughts and prayers," but here in the park, as I noticed the small, dependable changes -- the ones that remind us of the passing seasons and a functioning world -- I allowed myself a reprieve from my usual pessimism. The flowers didn't mind, because they knew.  7. There is always life under a blanket of snow. 

 
  
 

Late Winter Flowers Are What We Need To Make It to the Spring

1. On first glance, the landscape was pallid and bleak. Maybe, I thought, this would be the year that the plants, tired of being taken for granted, decided not to come back. It would be hard to blame them. But then I looked down and saw a clump of snow drops, and then another, forming a stream of green and white. 2. And then I saw a haphazard mound of spring crocus. Things were maybe not as bleak as I had thought. 3. I arrived in time to see the last of the glaciers melting into the earth.  4. I always feel grateful to see the heather in bloom. It's something I think about to calm down when I'm stuck in a tunnel on the A train with a screaming preacher. Soon, I will be far away from this noise and much closer to the heather, who never preaches, and especially not to a captive audience.  5. I might even say that heather is my favorite plant, but I can't forget the hellebore. Any plant that flowers with snow on the ground -- and manages to do it with such unassuming elegance -- deserves high praise. Imagine having to wake up and spend most of your life in the bitter cold. I'm not sure I could it. 6. It's nice to live in a culture like the United States circa 2018 that emphasizes the quiet strength and beauty of these late-winter flowers.  7. I sometimes can't imagine how we're going to get from where we are now to another, better (or not-worse) place.  8. But the snow drops remind me that there are hidden rivers, just waiting to be taken, if we know where to look. 

 

Notes on Florida (Vero)

1. We -- as in a group of siblings, cousins, parents, and I -- arrived at five o'clock at the Ocean Grill and found the restaurant packed. Earlier that afternoon on the beach, we tried to move our reservation later but the receptionist would not budge. "We can fit more people," she said, "but the time has to be firm." We didn't mind. We go to the Ocean Grill every year to enjoy its timeless (not in a geological sense) menu of fresh seafood (with a choice of three sides from a list of fifteen) served by an immortal wait staff dressed in tuxedos. If you grew up in Pittsburgh and went to Tambellini's on Route 51, you might know the kind of restaurant I'm talking about, the kind of place that forty or fifty years ago was referred to as "fancy."  2. As we ate, a full moon rose over the sea, which was only fifteen or twenty yards from the restaurant. The Ocean Grill has survived many hurricanes, but I worried about its fate in the next few decades. I had seen the maps, which showed large swaths of Florida underwater. Barring some miracle, the barrier island on which we now stood was not likely to make it.  3. I walked down to the shoreline, where I spoke to a pair of #gods emerging from the sea. I told them that I had written a novel about them, and one of them responded by asking if it was a bestseller. "It depends on how you define 'bestseller,'" I said, which seemed to satisfy them. It was, I realized as I returned to the boardwalk, a relief to no longer be fixated on the novel. Writing books is like running marathons; you obsessively train for a period of time and then it's over and you can forget about it until you figure out what's next.  I look back at the person who was obsessively training (or writing) and wonder how and why I did it -- because there's no logic to it -- and know that the answer is to be found in "the process" and not in "the result," but even that answer doesn't quite capture the desire to do something pointless, something that -- as an experience -- can't be packaged (or at least not completely) and sold by Amazon. But like the rising temperature, the commercial internet often seems too big and too complicated to fight; the battle was lost before we even became aware of the need to fight it. 4. These days, I've been running, which gives me time to think about such things. In Florida, we stayed a few miles inland (but still susceptible to rising waters), where I went running along an old highway built next to the train tracks. The weather was perfect; not too hot and not too cold. I wore shorts and a t-shirt for the first time since the record-breaking heat wave in New York City two weeks earlier. "I could spend winters in Florida," I said to myself, officially marking the beginning of my AARP years. 5. The next day, we drove north to Sebastian Inlet, where the sea was being churned by the high winds. We walked out on the concrete pier, passing people fishing and casting. There were many birds diving into the sea, sometimes emerging with a fish like a scene from Blue Planet II. I felt nervous watching, hoping the birds wouldn't get caught by a hook or tangled in a fishing line. According to Blue Planet II and some of the signs on the pier, there's enough fishing line in the ocean to wrap the planet twice, and most of it's plastic. It's difficult to spend a lot of time in Florida without regretting the existence of the human species.   6. It was easier to admire the currents reflecting the brilliant light in the big Florida sky.  7. There's a lush, magical quality to the Florida landscape -- and light -- that makes its ongoing degradation seem especially tragic, if you can bring yourself to think about it for more than a few minutes.  8. Everything looks good if you can view it with enough distance.  9. Even New York City looked miraculous from the plane, though I was certain to be cursing it once I was on the ground. 




 

Notes on the Death of Small Birds

1. Coincidentally, on the same day I happened to wonder what happens when birds die, I found a dead sparrow (not pictured) on the brick path (pictured).  2. I wasn't sure how it died, or if any of its bird friends or family had witnessed or mourned the death of this sparrow.  3. There were probably worse places to die; the snow drops had recently pushed through the frozen ground and were flowering.  4. I considered building a cairn for the sparrow; I had enough bricks but didn't have the space.  5. I didn't want to put in a plastic bag and throw it in the trash. 6. I buried it, which is what I would want someone to do for me if I were a dead sparrow. (And probably a dead person.) No casket or container (and definitely not a plastic shopping bag); just the bed of earth, a blanket of spring flowers, and a contemplative cat.   7. This done, we observed a moment of silence, during which we considered the possibility of flight before and after death.