Memories | The Gad About Town

Some Memories of Clawman Treefeller

Posted on August 11, 2016 by Mark Aldrich

I wish you could have known Matt Coleman. Many did, but not enough. There was not enough time. “Matt’s heart was so big, it surrounded him,” one of his colleagues wrote in a memorial tribute.

I am grateful that I happen to think this about so many people that I have met, those sentences like “You ought to know so-and-so,” or “You should have met my friend, X,” but I am frustrated that I have not said it out loud often enough to the people about whom I thought this. Matt already knew most of my friends, anyway, and the one friend I introduced Matt to, well, Matt asked her out. Or she asked him.

A person’s end should not be what the world knows of them, though, and eleven years ago today, August 11, 2011, my friend Matt Coleman was murdered. No one’s death should fight for attention with the person’s life, so I will briefly give the end, and then we will celebrate a gorgeous life.

A Muse to a Talent to Amuse

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Mark Aldrich

From 1995 till 1997, I wrote a humor column titled “The Gad About Town,” for a great weekly newspaper in Sullivan County, New York. (It, the newspaper, still exists, and so do I apparently.)

“The Gad About Town” held the distinction of being the only column in the newspaper that did not generate even one response letter from our readers. Another editorial columnist, a sweet, genial, elderly man, wrote the most innocuous pieces each week, yet he received the most vituperative letters from readers who took exception with everything he wrote. I admired that this only amused him.
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Memories of the Future

Posted on July 24, 2016 by Mark Aldrich

In his Confessions, St. Augustine writes, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not.” He decides that time is an idea, unique to humans, and also unique in that we can simultaneously grasp the past in memory, the present by attention, and the future by expectation. In our minds, but only there, we are not locked to one perception of one reality.

Earlier, I deleted everything that I had written up to that point by dragging my unbuttoned shirtsleeve across my laptop’s touchpad while reaching for my coffee. (No, I can not replicate the results in an experiment; yes, like an idiot, I have attempted to replicate these results in an experiment.) In a feat of memory, I retyped all that I had written to that point: simultaneously, I remembered what I had written, was super-present and typed it attentively in the moment, and I lived in expectation of a future in which I regularly saved my work, a lesson I first learned, oh, 20 years ago.

I was in three specific time-experiences at once, and each one sucked.
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