John Gallaher

It appears that we’re living (which isn’t always the case), depending on how one defines such things, in a “now you see it / now you see it” kind of way. We can say we’re working on our age, as well, listening to Bob Dylan songs where people can age in whatever direction supports the theme. “Too bad life doesn’t get themes,” Robin says, and yes, that’s right, and then we can all go do whatever it was we were going to do anyway. “It’s either that, or pay off the kidnapper,” as Neil Young had it, back in the mid-70s. There’s always an analogue, and someone to tell us about it, how, no matter how fast you run, you can’t run fast enough to get away from yourself. You could even call it a theme. For instance, I was the first one to an eighteen-wheeler accident on the highway once, in the early 90s. I didn’t know what I was going to find. It was just tossed there on its side, across both lanes. So I got out of the car and walked around to the front, only to see the driver standing inside the cab that was resting on the driver-side door. He was simply standing there behind the glass, parallel with the dashboard, a little blood on his forehead, looking as lost as I felt, looking back at him. All his things (magazines and maps and cigarettes and pens and snacks) in a little pile at his feet. When I left, a guy was hitting the windshield with a baseball bat. You go to the room, and the place you like to sit is missing. This is an opportunity to trust, I suppose, or perhaps for blind panic, if one were to consider this a metaphor for something. But say it’s not, say there are no such things as metaphors for a moment, and where does that get you? Presently, it gets me to a row of green and yellow plastic chairs, those 1950s-looking ones I imagine Kenton would like to collect. They’re joined together by shiny metal clasps, chrome, and the whole thing is full of sunlight through the plate glass window. It’s the kind of scene I think of as lickable, how everything looks like cheerful candy, and I wonder if there might be a way to be there or here without a beginning, or without an ending, or if perhaps there might be a concept for no middle.

“Ghosts are people who think they’re ghosts,” my daughter Natalie said, starting off the period we will refer to later as A Little Bit Further Along. Since then (which was last night, November 3rd, 2009), I’ve been thinking about where I am more, as a kind of goal, and somewhat less about where I’m not. It’s a pleasure to be where one is, given that someone isn’t somewhere lethal. This is Pleasure One. And now this is Pleasure Two, thinking about it, so that this place, which was Place One, and a pleasure, as we were there where we were and it was not a lethal place, but a place where we were, is now this place again as we’re here thinking about it, like America or a popsicle. “Open the house and the house is empty,” Natalie also said, meaning her dollhouse, as she’s seven, but when she said it, I had this vision of all of us suddenly disappearing, maybe thinking ourselves ghosts, even, or getting somewhere, out and around her bedroom and then down the hall and stairs. I’ll tell you how it happened. Natalie and I were looking out the window at the backyard, and she asked me if I liked our house. It’s a theme with her. The other night she asked me if I liked life. I said, “Yeah, a lot.” And she looked at me a second and then said, “Me too.” You don’t hear that every day, I think, until the accumulations begin to remind me of every day: Carla, who donated a kidney to her brother-in-law (Robin’s uncle), has just been diagnosed with cancer, two months later. She sends hopeful updates from the hospital, on Facebook. Like fountains, the footnotes go on. My footnote or yours. The big questions can’t be decided in this way. They demand coins or laws. And this is much too important to be a big question.

“Are you happy?” That’s a good place to start, or maybe, “Do you think you’re happy?” with its more negative tone. Sometimes you’re walking, sometimes falling. That’s part of the problem too, but not all of the problem. Flowers out the window or on the windowsill, and so someone brought flowers. We spend a long time interested in which way the car would best go in the driveway. Is that the beginning of an answer? Some way to say who we are? Well, it brings us up to now, at any rate, as the limitations of structure, which is the way we need for it to be. Invent some muses and invoke them, or save them for the yard, some animus to get us going. And what was it Michael said yesterday? That the committee to do all these good things has an agenda to do all these other things as well, that we decide are less good in our estimation, so then we have this difficulty. It just gets to you sometimes. We have a table of red apples and a table of green apples, and someone asks you about apples, but that’s too general, you think, as you’ve made several distinctions to get to this place of two tables, two colors. How can that be an answer to anything? Or we can play the forgetting game, how, for twenty years, my mother would answer for her forgetfulness by saying it was Old-Timer’s Disease, until she forgot that too. On the television, a truck passes left to right, in stereo. Outside, a garbage truck passes right to left. They intersect. And so the world continues around two corners. The table gets turned over, with several people standing around seemingly not sure of what comes next. Look at them politely as you can, they’re beginners too. And they say the right question is far more difficult to get to than the right answer. It sounds good, anyway, in the way other people’s lives are a form of distance, something you can look at, like landscape, until your own starts to look that way as well. Looking back at the alternatives, we never had children or we had more children. And what were their names? As the living room parts into halls and ridges, where we spend the afternoon imagining a plant, a filing cabinet or two...because some of these questions you have with others, and some you have only with yourself.