Matthew Gallaway

Night Running

1. For most of my life, the night -- and specifically its final hours -- has been the most neglected part of my day, a time when, if given the choice, I always wanted to be sleeping.

2. But lately, I've been waking up restless, almost with a sense of being summoned. It seems a little ridiculous -- it's still dark and it would be easy to get back under the covers -- but sleep feels too far away. There's no point fighting the impulse. I get up and go outside, where the air is cool and the block is calm. At this hour, the city is familiar -- I know where I am -- and foreign, as if I'm seeing it for the first time.

3. Over by the river, I pass the new billboard erected by Amtrak in the face of community opposition. It does ruin the view, but I guess it's worth it to line the pockets of an Amtrak executive help the trains run better.

4. The early morning is a time of quiet optimism -- there are no people -- and quiet despair, because so much of the landscape feels like the aftermath of something destructive. Still, the mind is flexible and permeable at this hour and in this light. I'm running through a dream and a nightmare.

5. The path through the park is hilly and uneven. It feels dangerous to let myself go, to run fast down the hill -- and I have fallen in the past (and probably will again in the future) -- but it's also difficult to resist. To fly down a hill releases the mind, an effect that's compounded by the night.

6. I find money on the steps.

7. The stairs from Riverside Drive lead me into an abyss.

8. Here is Manhattanville, the new campus of Columbia. The enormous scope of the construction site makes me feel like I'm on the moon.

9. The path on the river is my reward after navigating the hills, the steps, and the construction. Here I can run as fast as I want without fear of tripping.

10. Moving north, the path transitions from post-industrial wasteland to Victorian-park fantasy.

11. The bridge, always beckoning, reflects against the river.

12. Stone sentries guard the riverbank, some facing south.

13. And others facing north, wondering as the sky brightens what what they might find on the other side.

September Dreams and Nightmares

1. The kids went back to school and the high winds from the hurricane blew the caterpillars out of their tents, so they were crawling around everywhere (replacing the kids). I went to the park, where the cool temperatures felt like a resurrection. I was thankful not to be going back to school (or at least any of the schools I attended).

2. I ran laps around the park, which was relaxing until I passed someone (not pictured) who appeared to be staggering down the hill toward me on a pitch-black section of the path where the lights had gone out in the predawn. Having watched my fair share of The Walking Dead (miss u Seasons 2-5), it occurred to me that the zombie apocalypse had arrived; in a way, I thought, it might be a relief to have a new and literal apocalypse to replace the political one that has been unfolding. As it turned out, it was just an older (than me) man who appeared to be a bit stiff. Or maybe it was a zombie: I didn't stop to figure it out.

3. I was still thinking about a dream I had the previous night where I was sitting next to Elizabeth Warren and asking her about lightbulbs. Clearly, I was reading too many political blogs. I was also thinking about someone from my high school who responded to a very friendly group email from the class secretary asking for updates -- kids and/or life achievements -- for the alumni newsletter; this classmate was not pleased to have received the email and screamed back to the entire group IN ALL CAPS that he wanted nothing to do with our high school and had repeatedly asked to be taken off this list. He referred to the email as SPAM. (I get maybe one such email every two years or so to give you an idea of the frequency.) I didn't know him well in high school but I remembered him playing drums in a talent show. It was hard to reconcile that memory with this email. Had I already reached an age where my classmates were suffering from dementia? It seemed possible, maybe inevitable. Still, I thought it was a testament to our class that nobody responded and, as a result, the risk of a 'reply allpocalypse' was averted. I wondered if I should send an update to the class secretary but all I could think about in terms of children and/or life achievements was the fact that we had recently replaced the sidewalk in front of our house, which didn't seem like the right kind of news to share with the rest of my class (although I did take pictures and amused myself by visualizing the usual shots of children or exotic vacations juxtaposed with my new sidewalk). These are a few of the things that occupied my thoughts as the sky turned from black to silver to blue.

4. Meanwhile, Dante's ashes had arrived in the mail. They were placed in a small, wooden box that Zephyr -- who had taken to wandering around in the middle of the night and yowling -- immediately curled up next to and fell asleep. Maybe, I thought (not for the first time) animals know more than we think they do. A friend asked if we were going to scatter Dante's ashes in the garden and we said no; for now, they will live on a shelf next to Beatrice's, until I can figure out how to achieve my dream, which is to have a big family crypt, ideally overlooking the Hudson River, and ideally falling apart and covered in moss, like the ones at Trinity Church Cemetery in Harlem. My wish was to be forever associated with the eternal beauty of ruination.

5. Like most dreams, however, I'm not so sure how realistic this one is.

6. For now, I'll continue to enjoy the living dreams of the park, still the best place to escape the nightmares of the world.

Notes on Nashville (Travel Diaries)

1. As often happens when I visit cities, my favorite part of Nashville was the park; in this case, Centennial Park, the centerpiece of which is an exact replica of the Greek Parthenon. Constructed in the late 1800s as part of an exposition, its kitschy pointlessness is a refreshing antidote to the wave of capitalistic development ruining transforming the rest of the world.

2. I stayed in a trendy 'boutique' hotel not far from the conference I was attending. The eighth floor offered nice views of the skyline, dotted with construction cranes. According to my brother, who has lived in and around Nashville for several decades, hundreds of people are moving to the city every day.

3. Automotive traffic is intense and there's no infrastructure for the many brands of dockless scooters that can be seen everywhere. Several Nashville residents told me how annoying they found the scooters and I gently tried to suggest that the problem is really cars, which I quickly gathered isn't a widely shared perspective here. "Imagine if, instead of parking, a lane for bikes and scooters were installed on every street," is the kind thing you might as well say in another language.

4. My niece and her nonheterosexual relationship partner took my brother and me to a secret cocktail bar, where we discussed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and specifically the social isolation that afflicts so many of its victims. I had just finished reading 'I Can Give You Anything But Love' by Gary Indiana, which was brilliant, sad, and abrasive; brilliant because he's incredibly well read (there's a reason why he was friends with Susan Sontag); sad because of the self-abnegation with which he (consciously) infuses the work; abrasive in his critique of straight society (but reaffirming if you happen to share his viewpoints: sometimes it's easy to forget the truth of things until you read someone like Gary Indiana). After a few drinks, I was happy to expound on my theory that many and possibly most gays -- particularly in my generation -- could be diagnosed with PTSD after growing up in our homophobic society, except that I'm not sure we've reached the 'post' part yet. Is there such a thing as Ongoing Traumatic Stress Disorder? The subtext to this conversation, like so many, was the question of whether 'Trump will ever be over.' It's not a simple question to answer, unfortunately.

5. The next day, I went to the park and communed with the magnolias.

6. I had also just finished reading 'The Overstory' by Richard Powers (interesting in its treatment of nature/trees, but Very Straight and a bit too melodramatic for my tastes in terms of its human characters) and was thinking about the beauty of trees. The best thing about 'The Overstory' is the idea that we (people) are really an insignificant blip on the natural timeline in comparison to trees, which in a way provides an answer to what will happen when Trump (literally and metaphorically) is over. The trees will come back and the earth will be better off for it.

7. Centennial Park has some strikingly decrepit monuments.

8. This monument symbolizes the idea that nationalism is -- despite everything we hear -- on the wane in 2019.

9. This monument also celebrates the certainty that no country is immortal.

10. Unlike beauty and nature, which will always last.

Finding Beauty in the Late August Garden

1. In late August, the garden is tired. We can remember the flowers from a few months ago, but have a hard time recalling the autumn from almost a year earlier. Everyone is despondent.

2. 'It's too hot to stay outside but I'm too tired to move.'

3. 'I'm sick of looking at these stupid walls.'

4. 'Is he *still* in office?'

5. Cutting through the despondency requires a change of focus: the crumbling bricks of the path are hundreds of years old, each one a masterpiece of longevity and ruin.

6. As long as moss carpets the world, it will be worth pondering.

7. We moved one our orchids outside in a technique we refer to as 'pot on a rock,' which in a way is cheating but adds a splash of color in a sea of green.

8. After hearing about our troubles getting our miniature Chinese dogwood to bloom, a botanist friend recommended trimming the interior leaves from the tree. Whether it will help the bloom remains to be seen -- we read the news and ask ourselves: will we even make it to next spring? -- but revealing the architecture of the branches was an unexpected pleasure.

9. The grape vine, when viewed from a certain angle, seems to rise to the sky.

10. The ferns are quiet but resilient, a reminder to #resist.

11. The ivy makes the best of what little light it can find.

August Is the Longest Month

1. As the summer fades, the park becomes less buoyant. The colors -- more muted than in the spring -- don't burst forth so much as seep through the green. The beauty feels more composed, the work of a mature artist.

2. A rose still blooms, but its leaves are yellow and mildewed, which -- in a way -- makes the flower seem that much more valuable.

3. Except for a few pools of color, the landscape is quiet and subdued.

4. The petals of a cone flower are burned and clipped, but somehow -- with so many working together -- it doesn't matter; if anything, these imperfections elevate the overall effect.

5. In August, our sense of appreciation is muted but genuine. There was so much we wanted to get done and, fortunately, we finished some of it.

Governors Island (Field Trips)

1. The ferry to Governors Island was shorter than I had expected, the distance over the water maybe a half mile. I went on a weekday with a group of work colleagues as part of a non-mandated 'team-building' experience. Having organized the trip ourselves, the itinerary was relatively unstructured: 1) go to Governors (no apostrophe) Island, 2) eat lunch, and 3) return from Governors Island.

2. Governors Island feels like another world, or another century, the landscape dotted with disused buildings and forts, some rehabilitated and some not.

3. Blissfully, there are no privately owned cars racing around terrorizing pedestrians and bikers. If you've ever tried to imagine what Manhattan might look like if we limited the amount of private car storage on the sides of our streets, here's your answer.

4. It was a very hot day -- mid-nineties with high humidity -- but we found a breeze at the tip of the island, which is covered in lawns dotted with Adirondack chairs.

5. There are two hills, beautifully landscaped, in the middle of the island, which offer views of the city and harbor.

6. The white tents in the foreground can be rented for overnight 'glamping,' which I might recommend if you were visiting New York City and wanted to avoid 'the hordes.'

7. In the afternoon, the skies turned dark as a storm rolled in over the sea.

8. We took shelter in the glamping bar/restaurant, which is open to the public. Securing the flaps of the tent in the lashing rains felt like being on a schooner. Or it did until we had settled in with our gin-and-tonics.

9. When the storm ended, we turned into seagulls and flew away.

Saturday Morning Five A.M. (Free the Internet)

1. This morning, not long after five o'clock, the night sky gave way to a pale, pink glow on the horizon.

2.  The plants at this hour have the same fluid, transitional quality as the light: they seep into crevices between the rocks and form streams and tributaries.

3. As the sky brightens, it awakens the sleeping colors.

4. Here, for a few minutes, before I’ve read the news or scrolled through Twitter, I feel optimistic. I forget that society is increasingly dominated by the internet, which is the opposite of a public garden.

5. This landscape -- the one in front of me, not the 'digital' one -- is a work of art whose creators continually step aside, leaving it for the rest of us to appreciate (or not) or interpret (or not).

6. It feels like a necessary but increasingly elusive process in the world of politics and business, where so many seem to want to 'live forever,' as if by the accumulation of wealth and power, they will control the passage of time, an illusion enabled by the internet, where 'nothing ever dies.

7. In the garden, it's easy to grasp that there is one path, which leads both into and out of the trees.

Notes on Western Pennsylvania (The Woods)

1. There was something familiar and comforting about being in the woods, familiar because I had grown up around here and comforting because, for a few minutes, it was easy to forget about the rest of the world and its many problems.

2. My brother and I had spent the trip across the state ranking the worst industries: for me, it was automobiles, whereas he put pharmaceuticals at the top of his list. But then we remembered plastics. And chemicals. And banks.

3. Later in the weekend, my brother recounted the mental games he used to play while walking in circles around a parking lot near his school, jumping from barrier to barrier. As I listened to him, I had a disorienting sense of having my own memories being excavated and described by someone else. 'What are you talking about?' my mother asked. 'The obsessive personality traits we inherited from you,' I said. We all laughed. In a way, it was comforting to think about some of my obsessive qualities arising outside of a gay context: it made me feel closer to the nonhomosexual members of my immediate family (which is to say, all of them).

4. We went to the recently opened Pittsburgh Botanic Garden in North Fayette Township, which -- like so many towns around Pittsburgh -- was a place name I had heard many times, but wasn't quite sure I had ever been. The hills and valleys are a disorienting, haunting mystery for anyone who hasn't lived here 'at least sixty years,' as my mother reminded us. The Pittsburgh Botanic is still very much a work in progress, but I was encouraged by the enthusiasm of the staff and volunteers. The world is on the brink of collapse and people were gardening: it seemed like a reasonable choice. A highlight was the lily pond, which a few years ago was filled with toxic runoff from a nearby coal-mining operation. I tried to focus on the lotus flower and not think about all of the fracking sites we had passed on the way here. (Or the confederate flags.)

5. The next day, walking through a different woods (Boyce Park), I wondered if anyone else in my family shared my lifelong love of ferns and moss, but decided it was a question I didn't need to ask.

Notes on the Appalachians

1. The fog hung low over the hills.

2. The roads were flooding, cars drowning.

3. Everywhere I looked: green and silver.

4. I was home.

5. Western Pennsylvania: still haunted.

The Park Has Turned Me into a Morning Person

1. Somehow, I've joined the apparitions who wake up before dawn and drift over the mostly empty sidewalks and streets of the city.

2. I have no idea where everyone else is going, but it's not to the park. Besides the rocks, the trees, and the flowers, there's never anyone here. The humidity, usually so oppressive, gives the air a silver sheen. It's not exactly silent -- there are birds and the rustling of leaves -- but it's silent in a way that leaves room for thoughts and ideas that might otherwise be lost in the press of the working day.

3. At this hour, in this park, I can watch a parade of roses.

4. Here the path is easy to see, which I try to remember later on, when I'll be floundering to take a step.