Matthew Gallaway's Blog

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I arrived on Monday to spend a week with my mother, who is about to turn ninety-four. 

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Like many people her age, her memory is failing. 

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When I got to her apartment, I asked her if she had eaten lunch. It was one o'clock, and she said, 'I don't remember.' 

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Which wouldn't be a problem if we had a good way to track if and when she gets her meals. 

We've hired aides to assist my mother but have learned that some agencies provide that information as a matter of course, and some do not.  

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Healthcare is a wilderness. 

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In the mornings, I went running through the forest and tried to clear my mind. 

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It seemed strange and tragic that my father had slowly lost his mind and now my mother was following in his footsteps. 

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What did this say about my future? 

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I tried not to think too much about what I would do if I felt like my mind was slipping away. 

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Or how short life begins to seem when you are observing someone in its final phases, and you begin to do the calculations forward and backward, e.g., 'my mother is x years older than I am, and I can easily remember being x years younger, and it doesn't seem so long ago.' Or maybe it does seem like a long time ago. 

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I met someone while tidying up my mother's garden, and I felt a connection: we're all striving for something. 

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I watched the sunset with my mother. 

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She seemed lost in her thoughts. 

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But I was also lost in thought. 

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What difference does it really make if you can remember if you ate lunch? 

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She is still my mother, but she is also disappearing. 

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The same could be said for all of us. 

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By this point of the year, with summer fading, the sun is just beginning to rise over the park at five in the morning.

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The fringes of the sky turn blue, and the familiar shapes of trees and plants push through the remaining night.  

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Nobody else is in this section of the park. 

It's comforting to be alone for a few minutes. I can feel the rising sun and it makes me hopeful. 

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Before I start scrolling through the terrible news.

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It's a strange time to be alive, when it seems like we're on the cusp of many things both good and bad. (But let's be honest: mostly bad.) 

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The dim light makes the flowers look like they are frozen in time, or part of a painting. 

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The garden is a pathway to another world. 

In anticipation of an upcoming recording session with the full band, I wrote a song to celebrate the end of summer and the start of fall. 

Link. 

The full DeathCulture@Sea playlist is here. 

Is there a DeathCulture@Sea song you think we should record with the full band? Send me an email or let me know in the comments :) 

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Even in 2025, a year when so many good things are struggling, dawn is still available for those who want to partake. 

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The park was empty, but the orange dahlias were showing off. 

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The asters had just woken up. 

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In the early morning, it's easy to pretend that the world outside the park doesn't exist. 

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For a few minutes, anyway. 

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Admittedly, it was very hot and humid, even at 5:45. The leaves and flower petals of many plants had been singed in the heat.

According to the leaders of our country, global warming is a figment of our collective imagination.

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I wonder where that path will lead.

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For the second year in a row, Stephen and I went back to Douglas, a small town in West Michigan.

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I had forgotten how beautiful the lake was. 

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Every night, people come to the beach to watch the sunset. 

I was fixated on the birds. 

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And the reflection of the sun on the rippling water. 

One day, the wind picked up and the surf was rough. 

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We went on walks up and down the beach. 

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It was good to reflect on where we had been, and where we were going. 

I thought about what it might be like to live here as a bird. 

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They did not seem happy or unhappy. 

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The shore is marked by rocks that I'm guessing were deposited here at some point during the ice ages. 

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I went into the sand dunes, which are as magnificent as the lake. 

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The beach is never crowded. 

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I'm slightly worried because my friend Liana told me that there was an ad for Saugatuck and Douglas in the New York Times. 

It seemed important to document the 'before' picture. 

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I climbed to the top of the hill. 

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I thought about life as a tree in the pine forest. 

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I took a selfie with my friends. 

As in the desert, there's a stark beauty to the dunes. 

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The sky was immense.

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There was one path forward. 

The beach was littered with remains. 

Except for the lapping water, the night was quiet. 

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Last month, I received an email from If It Be Your Will, a podcast that features interviews with indie-rock musicians. At first, I thought it might be a marketing scam, and even after I realized it wasn't, I needed to overcome my own skepticism about my past and especially my closeted past, as if every part of it was tainted by deception. 

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But the interview ended up being an amazing experience. Chris Colley (the podcaster and interviewer) was not only a long-time fan of the Saturnine, but was also part of the indie-rock scene in Montreal, where we played many times. As we we reflected back on Saturnine, the distinction between artist and audience blurred, and it felt like we were talking about something we had gone through together. 

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I emerged from the experience feeling less critical of my past, which was a very unexpected but meaningful gift, and one that I am trying to bring to other facets of my life. The past is immutable, but my understanding of it can change. 

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Has anyone else recently had revelations about your past? If so, feel free to drop a note in the comments :) 

Here is the podcast: 

https://www.ifitbeyourwill.ca/2025/07/ifitbeyourwill-s05e27-matt-gallaway.html

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Now that I'm running again, I've started going to the park at sunrise. 

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I had forgotten how beautiful it is. 

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The outside world doesn't exist. 

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And the park is an underwater dream world. 

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How is this even possible? 

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Like our democracy, the sick elm tree is barely hanging on. 

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It seems like we are on a path. 

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But we are also at crossroads in this path. 

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I worry that we are making the wrong choice. 

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In the park yesterday, I was astounded by the many varieties of hydrangea, all in bloom. There were blue ones (not my favorite, tbh). 

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There were white ones (on the oak-leaf hydrangea). And so many more, which I'll be displaying below. 

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But outside of the park, the news was predictably more grim, especially from the Supreme Court of the United States. 

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But first let's admire some more varieties of hydrangea! 

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They are all different and lovely in their own way. 

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Which is not something that the Supreme Court recognizes about people. 

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Gays are not important enough to be viewed as having contributed equally to our country, so if your 'religion' has a problem with us, then your children don't have to read about us in school. Our existence is too dangerous for young minds! Can you imagine making that argument to the Supreme Court of the United States ... and winning????

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Even a first grader can understand why the right to religious freedom should not be weaponized to discriminate against others. But as Zohran Mamdani demonstrated this week, these same others are getting tired of being abused by a government and courts that have been propping up an archaic class whose power derives from subjugation. 

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I never thought I'd see the day, but the hydrangeas have had enough. 

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The park, as always, remained a bulwark against tyranny and dictatorship. The rain and cool temps had also made it very lush and green. 

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After two consecutive weeks of traveling, I was happy to be back. 

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I was also happy to be running. This week, I went to my first speed workout in over a year at the Riverbank State Park (on 145th) with the Front Runners. Attendance was low, because apparently many (gay) runners who live in the area make the trip to a different workout in Brooklyn (has anyone heard of 'Williamsburg'?), where the focus is on sprinting and not distance, which seems like a lot of work for a workout. (LOL) But I had fun talking to the coach, who like me is a senior citizen in terms of running. We complained about how difficult it is to get into races around the city. I mentioned that I might be interested in doing the 'Bronx 10' in September and he said that it had sold out in three hours in February. Annoying! 

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A symbol of democracy, one of the elm trees is barely hanging on. This week I read an article about a new beach in Chelsea where you're not allowed to go swimming because the NYC sewage system is antiquated, which means every time it rains, raw sewage pours into the river (to the tune of 20 billions gallons per year!). Why do we pay hundreds of millions of dollars for police overtime when the sewer system could be upgraded, which would allow NYC residents and visitors to go swimming? Why is it so difficult for the government to provide us with nice things? (I think about this every time I go to the public track, which was filled with people running laps, playing soccer, jumping rope, hanging out, etc.) 

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I was surprised to see azaleas blooming this late in the season. 

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The peonies were right on schedule, however. 

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I don't typically offer many health tips on this blog, but I will briefly make the case for toe-separated socks. I've been wearing them for about a year, and my toes are much less crunched-up than they used to be, which I think helps with balance and stability while running. Take this advice or leave it! (But if you do take it, let me know how it works out for you in the comments!) 

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The roses are always beautiful (but they know it). 

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Mostly I thought about how the world is falling apart and the park is still miraculously here. 

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I ran to the park this morning in a light rain that was perfect for April. 

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The new growth on the plants vibrated with color and life under the gray skies. 

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Not everyone made it through the winter, sadly, including this clump of heather. 

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I was a little bit hungover from a pre-reunion party I went to at my friend Jessica's house in Park Slope. It's been thirty years since we graduated from law school. 

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We talked about professors we liked and didn't like, as well as fellow classmates. Some of them are powerful Republicans now. I wondered if they were all convening at a different house in a different neighborhood. Maybe they were gloating about Trump. 

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Jessica and I talked about how relatively clueless we were in law school at NYU, specifically with regard to a kind of 'elite track' for certain students who are either very good at taking law-school exams or very good at networking with the right people to line them up for prestigious legal careers. We speculated that some of this knowledge comes from families. I described a law professor I know who told me that as a child, her parents -- both professors -- used to sit around the dinner table gossiping about who was going to get a job at which university. Neither Jessica nor I grew up in what would be considered an 'intellectual environment,' which we understood put us at a bit of a disadvantage with those who did. It's almost like growing up in a family that speaks a second language; you are going to be more fluent in that language than most other speakers. 

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Being closeted in my twenties added to my overall naivete about many things in the world. 

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It was good to see people from thirty years ago and to realize how much in some ways that I've changed. (And how much in other ways that I've not changed.) 

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Standing in the park and mulling over the passage of time, I realized, is a great pleasure of being old enough to stand in the park and mull over the passage of time.