Matthew Gallaway

Our Most Beautiful Light: My Mother's Billerica

A few weeks ago, to celebrate my mother's 90th birthday -- which is also on September 11 and more fun to think about! -- my older sister and I took her to her hometown of North Billerica, Massachusetts. In some ways, it was like revisiting a lost world, one where my mother had grown up getting milk from a neighbor's cow and where she and her sisters had walked everywhere because their family didn't own a car. For me, it was especially interesting to hear her talk about what it was like growing up; not only the fun stuff she did with her sisters, but also the challenges of dealing with a depressive father and a mother who didn't quite fit in with her husband's family (she was from Canada, he was born and raised in Billerica), which instilled in my mother a desire to leave -- or escape -- that I found very familiar and relevant to the way I (and probably a lot of others) think about childhood. I recorded much of the trip -- along with some observations -- and edited the audio down into my first -- and possibly last :) -- podcast, which you can listen to below. 

Here's a link if you can't see the banner, and below are some pix. 

The Faulkner Mill. (Or maybe it's the Talbot -- I'm not sure!) 

The house on Mason Avenue in Garden City (a neighborhood in North Billerica that was originally built for union workers by the B&M Railroad) where my mother was born. 

Ninety years ago, my mother was a baby in the corner apartment of this house. 

Here she is at a house on Treble Cove Road, where she lived as a teenager (again, in an apartment on the side). 

My mother and her sister Linda at the North Billerica train station. 

The Middlesex Canal, where they used to go swimming and ice skating. 

On a Narrow Path in the Pennsylvania Woods

I entered the woods by way of a footbridge. From a distance, the stone trail-marker on the opposite side looked like a statue or an apparition. It had been a long time since I had left the city, and I had forgotten what it was like to be immersed in the greens and browns of summer, to be guided through the forest on a path. 

It was just after sunrise and the leaves and ground were still wet. The trail was thick with spider webs, which I had to clear away from my face. 

Except for the spider webs, it was very peaceful; it was, I remembered, very different than how I had felt the previous night in the aisles of a suburban supermarket. I listened to my arms and legs brushing against the leaves; a few times, an animal scurried away unseen. There were birds overhead, chirping and squawking.  

There was one way in which the forest reminded me of the supermarket: each place represented a kind of bubble where it was easy to forget about the increasingly extreme problems of the outside world, to pretend that I had returned to a 'normal' existence. I had last visited these woods two years ago; so many things had changed during that period, and so many other things had not changed at all. I wondered what the next two years would deliver, and whether I was right to feel optimistic or pessimistic. 

I passed a waterfall that ran over and through the layers of shale. 

Sunlight filtered through the leaves onto another footbridge. 

At the bottom of the ravine, I crossed the river, muddy and swollen with rain. 

The path out of the woods looked no different than the path in. 

The Garden Report: Special Catnip Edition

This year, we decided to grow cherry tomatoes and herbs in the garden. We (by which I mean Stephen) started in February with seeds and grow-lights, and now we're seeing the results. It's miraculous to consider the very obvious fact that plants -- using nothing but what they can receive by way of air, soil, and water -- are able to grow and produce edible fruit, but at the same time, it's daunting to remember how difficult it would be, as individuals, to grow the food we need to eat, assuming -- in our case -- we need more than a handful of cherry tomatoes and some basil and thyme. More complicated I think is the difficulty most Americans not directly involved have in acknowledging that we've turned over most of our food production to an environmentally punishing industrial complex that exploits animals and workers in unimaginable ways to get our food to us. Is growing cherry tomatoes a small step toward a larger revolution? Probably not, but maybe it's something to ask the question.  

Zephyr and Clio, who have not seen a significant change in their lives since the easing of lockdown restrictions, seem fascinated by any change in the garden. 

We decided to grow catnip because Zephyr kept munching plants at random (as far as we could tell) throughout the entire garden, treating it like a big salad, which did not sit well with his stomach. 

As per the name, he likes to take little bites -- or nips -- of the leaves, but there is often a line. 

The order is always Elektra, Clio, and then Zephyr. (Girls before boys.) 

Here's Clio enjoying some catnip with the stoner-filter applied. 

The other garden news this summer is that a bluejay moved in. Sometimes he squawks at me because he wants privacy while he takes a bath in our fountain. I try to accommodate the request, because for many years, we only had pigeons and sparrows, so the bluejay represents biodiversity in this corner of the world. I like to think that maybe this bluejay represents another symbolic step toward repairing something that is broken. 

I'm less confident that -- in most ways -- getting back to "normal"  feels like such a step.  

The flight path has been resurrected, which means we can once again look up and wonder where everyone is going. 

The City As a Mystic Gay Cosmos

This week, to honor Pride and self-education, I finished reading Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay World, 1890-1940, by George Chauncey (in the Second Trade Paperback Edition from 2019; the First Edition was published in 1994). I wish I had read it twenty-seven years ago, but as with planting trees, the present is better than ten years from now. The book covers a lot of very interesting ground related to the transformation and, to some extent, the formation of a modern gay identity, which should not be conflated with the existence and expression of homosexual desire -- the secret, magical ingredient of humanity -- which of course is a constant throughout history. The book also covers the ebb and flow (mostly flow, except perhaps counterintuitively during Prohibition, which sent everyone underground) of the regulatory and policing measures designed to inhibit or punish homosexual acts (and those engaged in them), which cannot be considered separately from the above question of identity, because the laws -- in effect, if not always in intention -- dictated where and how gays could meet (or not) in public or semi-public (bars, etc.), which in turn played a big part in how they (we) began to understand ourselves as gay people (as opposed to people having gay sex, which understanding was more prevalent 100 years ago). 

The idea of a gay identity arising to some important degree out of an opposition to the state is something I think about a lot in the present, when the state often seems more benign but only, I would argue, to the extent that it encourages gays to replicate the heterosexual/family mode essential to the reproduction of our extreme, market-oriented (neoliberal) society. If you accept the idea that our current government is run by and for corporations, the attempt to co-opt a new, apolitical gay identity is especially loathsome in light of our anti-state origin story. Putting aside all the pink-washing talk of achievements and acceptance and pride, gay sex is what they fear because gay sex is still radical (in the political sense) precisely because it's never reproductive, and it should be recognized as such -- by gays and non-gays alike -- in any attempt to fight the current regime or to refashion a new and better one. 

Another interesting facet of the book, which I was thinking about on my run through the park, was its description of the many places in New York City that once existed where gays could meet each other, to socialize and to have sex, including countless saloons and bars and cafeterias; the west side docks, all of Riverside Drive apparently (!?), subway and hotel restrooms, 42nd Street, movie theaters, bathhouses, parks big (Central) and small (Bryant). (Partial list.) It was not exactly a nirvana: most of these places were heavily policed, which lead to many arrests, beatings, public shaming, and ruined lives. But there were far too many gays for these places to be eradicated. As last summer demonstrated, there are only so many people the police can arrest at any given moment. 

To read this history left me with a sense that, over the past fifty or more years, gay life -- and gay sex -- like so much else in our culture, has been 'privatized.' Market forces have largely eradicated the more chaotic, unregulated spaces (parks, docks) that were once relegated to gays (and other marginalized populations), and have even reduced the number of semi-private spaces (bars, bookstores) that catered to gays. Gays no longer need these spaces to have sex or to socialize; it can happen over (or largely by way of) the internet, where everything is -- tragically -- market-driven and, for that reason, a little sad. 

One of the casualties of the pandemic in my neighborhood was the closure of a gay bar that had opened in 2019, just a few blocks away from me on Broadway. 

This week, I realized how much I missed it. Not because I was a regular, but because it was comforting to know that there was a space nearby where, for a few minutes, I could pretend to be in a different time.

The Week of Roses

The roses have been blooming in the park for a while now, but I didn't pay much attention to them until this week. Unlike heather, azaleas, and peonies, roses aren't a showpiece at Fort Tryon -- there are just a few, interspersed bushes -- so it's sometimes tempting to just give them no more than a passing glance. But I had just read a piece about roses by Edith Zimmerman in which she describes being won over by the magical scent of the flowers, and I decided to stop. 

As usual, I was feeling anxious and depressed about many things, including: the implosion of the progressive candidates for mayor; the projected increase in demand for cars around the world and the implications of that trend for climate change and the destruction of communities everywhere; the failure of the Democratic party to enact meaningful legislation and the implications of that failure for even the semblance of democracy in our country; and most of all, my ongoing despair at the cancellation of Terrace House, the Japanese reality television show. This is only a partial list, of course. 

But as soon as I put my nose near the rose, all my concerns vanished. The smell was sweet, but not too sweet, and -- contrary to my fears, based on any product I've ever smelled that claimed to capture the scent of a rose -- there was nothing artificial or cloying about it. The smell was intense but somehow gentle and low-key. I felt tranquilized and hypnotized. All of my concerns were far away. The effect only lasted a fraction of a second, but it was enough. Or almost enough, because I repeated the process several times. It was very satisfying. It was even possible, I thought as I ran home, that the smell of a rose on a living bush is better than cut roses, which in my experience can be a little cloying. Giving everyone access to live roses was another reason to have more public parks and gardens in our country instead of billionaires. 

Back home, I remembered the roses as I finishing recording a new song. 

Link

'Wading through the memories of a year that time forgot...' etc. 

 

Business as Usual

This week at the park, the hostas and the oak-leaf hydrangeas were in bloom. I didn't find these flowers quite as spectacular as many that have already come and gone, but I warned myself against living in the past (or the future). 

Instead, I allowed myself to be hypnotized by the new growth on the heather. 

When I went to the dentist on Tuesday, the hygienist looked at my chart and frowned. "It's been a while," she said, crushing my hopes that a pandemic might have provided a good excuse for missing three cleanings. But it appeared that the hygienist, like so many others in the United States, had already forgotten about the pandemic. 

I was also hoping that she might appreciate that I was approaching the question of time from a more subjective vantage point. For example, it didn't feel like such a long time since I had last been to the dentist's office -- the classic-rock radio station was on, just like always, playing Steve Miller and Aerosmith -- but it seemed like she was taking an excruciatingly long time to arrange all of her metal instruments on the metal tray. Or how, lately, every time I look at the calendar, it feels like two weeks have passed. "You can lean back now," she finally said, opening a door to the present through which I had no choice but to step.   

In the park, I took a picture of the same oak-leaf hydrangea (with my favorite elm trees in the background) that I take every year. 

I didn't remember this late-blooming red azalea, however. 

In some ways, I thought, I was ready to get back to business as usual, too.

More Than a Feeling

A few days ago, I received an invitation to a party that's being held next week in Brooklyn, which instigated a cost-benefit analysis that I had forgotten used to be a regular part of my pre-pandemic life. On the benefit side, it sounded like a fun party, where I would be able to talk to a few friends and probably a few other people I didn't know. In short: a party. It had been a long time since I had attended a party. I was intrigued. It was also being hosted outdoors, which alleviated most of my residual covid anxiety. On the cost side, however, Brooklyn is still an hour from Washington Heights. Somehow I had forgotten, or convinced myself, that these two places (both within New York City, after all) had drifted closer together. But they had not; it was just a projection of how, during the pandemic, my world had become so much smaller.  

I'm also going to the dentist next week, which poses logistical challenges I used to take for granted. If my appointment is at eleven, what time should I leave? Should I take the subway or an e-bike? Monday is supposed to be 90+ degrees. Would my dentist still be playing the same depressing classic-rock radio station? Was I prepared to hear "More Than a Feeling"? If I made it though the dentist unscathed, I thought, maybe I would be more inclined to go to the party. Somehow it was reaffirming to acknowledge the way small, irrational factors often tilt the balance in favor of doing one thing versus another. 

The park, which is a fifteen-minute run from my house, continued to be an oasis, even though the peonies were shedding petals, a sign that spring was ending. 

I'm sad to see it go, but it's been a good spring, with plenty of rain and cool weather. It was a season that made me think about the world in terms of possibilities. 

It's a stark contrast to the political climate, which makes me fear that the world is falling apart.

The End of Lockdown

It seemed to me that everyone I knew -- friends, family, work colleagues -- was busy making plans to go places and do things that required significantly more preparation than say, a walk around the block. I remembered my pre-pandemic routines, when I, too, was always on the move, either within the city or between New York City and somewhere that wasn't New York City, when figuring out the logistics of getting somewhere -- planes, trains, and automobiles -- had been a constant feature of my life. Even at the time, it wasn't something I had always loved. Airport terminals -- high cathedrals of unadulterated capitalism -- had increasingly triggered in me a kind of existential despair, but like most adults I had learned to endure the angst if it meant arriving at my destination, often hundreds or thousands of miles away, in a space of hours. 

It was how society operated, and I was a part of society. I had never really questioned it; or maybe I had questioned it, but never in a way that felt anything but hypothetical. It wasn't like I could opt out. But now, having been given exactly that opportunity for the past fifteen months, I wasn't sure how much I wanted to opt back in. Others were taking the plunge; for me, there would be a lot of toe-dipping and nervous hesitation. It was going to be a process. I might never get in above my ankles. 

I went to the park, where the dianthus were in bloom. 

If we had more parks, I thought, maybe we would not feel as compelled to go everywhere all the time. It occurred to me that traveling is often a means to run away from something, a problem or a circumstance. I was no different, it was just that I didn't have to go very far to escape. 

I stopped to admire a kousa dogwood in full bloom. We have a miniature variety in our garden that has never flowered. It might be a question of light, or water, or fertilization. It was an ongoing dilemma. We could leave and forget about it, or try to figure it out, or just learn to be satisfied with a non-flowering tree. 

I realized that growing older has made me a little more selfish about time. It's increased my reluctance to wade into the morass of logistics, when I could do other things such as writing new Death Culture @ Sea songs, like the one I recorded this week :) 

Link 

My trip to the park made me think that while travel can never take you away from yourself, you don't have to go very far to realize that the world is a dream. 

Freedom Run (Week Sixty-Two)

As regular readers might remember, a few months ago, we went into our backyard and found a mother cat who had just given birth to three kittens. With the help of a local Trap Neuter and Return (TNR) group, we managed to trap the mother and the kittens, who were all taken to an informal shelter (someone's apartment). The mother raised the kittens but unlike her offspring was too feral to be adopted. After being spayed, she was ready this week to be returned to her home, which in her case was the streets of the city.  

The woman from the TNR group delivered the mother cat -- now named 'Mercedes' -- in her cage, which was covered with a sheet to keep her calm. I wondered what it would be like to be in her place, and whether she would miss the food and shelter she had received over the past few months. If she did, she didn't show it: she hurled herself against the cage, which we quickly opened. 

She rushed out of the cage and up the stairs. "You go, girl,' said the TNR woman between doing play-by-play for her Instagram followers. 'This is Mercedes and she's on her freedom run.' For her part, Mercedes seemed to know exactly where she going. 

After climbing to the top of a wooden fence, she paused for no more than a second. I tried to imagine how she felt: excited, relieved, angry, grateful, and afraid all seemed like possibilities. I wished that I could have interviewed her. I bet she would have interesting insights to offer the many others who, following a period of captivity, are about to embark on their version of a freedom run.

I also wondered if I would ever want to take my own.  

The Magic Mountain (Week Sixty-One)

This week, in accordance with the recently updated CDC guidelines, I started running again without a mask. It was a relief. Over the past few months, I've started listening to podcasts on my runs, which meant that between my glasses, my headphones, and the mask, the real estate represented by my ears was definitely overdeveloped. 

Losing the mask helped. I felt lighter. It made me consider losing the headphones, too. As recently as last year, I would have said that I would never listen to anything while running. It was time I used to meditate (I know: not officially, don't @ me), to let the mind wander, to come up with amazing ideas that would never occur to me when I wasn't running (even though running ideas, like dreams, are never as exciting as they first seemed when reconsidered in a static position). But I'm not quite ready to abandon podcasts, in part because I feel like I can learn relevant things, and in part because I feel like podcasts can almost trick me into feeling like I just went out and had coffee or a drink with some friends, even though they did all of the talking. One thing about lockdown life is that it's greatly increased the amount of time I spend with my voice in my head, and it's nice to replace it with some other voices for a while. 

At the same time, I passed many people -- pedestrians and fellow runners -- who were still wearing masks, and I wanted to reassure them, to explain that I was vaccinated and had never voted for a Republican. (I didn't do this, fortunately.) 

So far, it's been a cool spring, which is my favorite kind of spring. It felt good to breathe. But even without a mask on, I found it difficult to envision returning to pre-pandemic life: taking the train back and forth to work, flying to conferences and vacations. Sitting in the airport lounge, eating granola and fruit from the buffet. I feel like I've lost some trust in society, or maybe my ability to navigate through it. I imagine going back to pre-pandemic life would be like going back to high school or something; fun for a few seconds but then pretty awkward once the novelty wore off. 

I kept thinking about what my friend Natasha tweeted: "I could do another year in quar, tbh." Lol but also hard same. 

I also kept thinking about the end of The Magic Mountain, when Hans, after spending seven years at the sanatorium, finally leaves and is last seen on a WWI battlefield.