My Life – Matthew Keville

Fourth of July Travelogue

Hey, all. I know I’ve been gone for a long while. Like the rest of y’all, I’ve been mostly sheltering in place to avoid Covid-19. Like many of you, I thought that working from home would give me more time to write, but as someone wise said, it’s not about working from home, it’s about living at work. The job takes up as much mental energy as it ever did, and it hangs over my head in my off-hours in a way that it generally didn’t before.

That said, I am still writing, if not as much as I hoped or thought I would, and you’ll see some of it here soon. In the meantime, enjoy this tale of my first escape from the City – and my apartment – since March.

If You’re Looking For A Gift Idea…

Hey all.

It’s my birthday this weekend! If you’d like to give me a gift, leave a review for Hometown. If you’ve read it and liked it, of course. If you’re feeling extra generous, review my other stories. If you’ve read and like them, of course.

Remember, reviews make a very tangible difference in how books are treated on Amazon! I’m trying to get Hometown above fifty and the other stories above twenty!

Sweating In The Sun

I’ve been listening to that song a lot lately. And watching the video; the video adds whole new layers of meaning that I didn’t know were there, as a good music video should. The ghosts of those teens looking through the passing freight train at the grown man as he’s clearly remembering when he was them really drives something home to this particular middle-aged small town boy.

(By the way, I think it’s kind of funny that “twenty years” after eighteen – i.e., thirty-eight – seems to be the default age for songs like this, where the singer is lost in bittersweet memory about their long-ago youth. I’m almost five years past thirty-eight myself, and of course Bob Seger is way past it by now. Thirty-eight doesn’t seem that old. But I suppose twenty years is a nice medium number when you’re talking a human time scale, where ten years isn’t enough to even realize that time is passing and thirty makes it ancient history. Twenty years is when you realize that time really has passed, that the world has changed and so have you, that you really aren’t young anymore, not like you were back then, and you’ve actually been dealing with adult things – good and bad – for some time now, and you’re past the scrambling-to-survive stage and maybe have a few moments to count the cost.)

My Last Summer In Camden

I’m going to start this essay by admitting that the title isn’t entirely accurate. The summer of 1995 was not the last summer I spent in Camden, New York. It was the summer just before I left for college, and I would return the following three summers before finally moving to Boston after graduation in the summer of 1999.

And yet the title is as true as it is inaccurate. In retrospect, 1995 was the last summer that I was a true resident of Camden before I rode off into my wide-open future beyond the hills and the horizon. The next four years, as far as I was concerned, I was a citizen of St. Lawrence University, only coming back to Camden over Summer and Winter Break to visit the family, recover from the semester, and make some money before I returned to my real home.

That was a special summer, like none other before or since. Usually, an opening like that announces the beginning of a summer love story, but that love story – the love story that would define my life for the next thirteen years – didn’t begin until I actually got to college. That summer was a time for a different kind of romance.

Two Summers

I’ve been thinking a lot lately. Thinking about Summer. Two particular summers, in fact. Two special summers, long ago. Sometimes they seem long ago, anyway. Sometimes they seem like yesterday.

I visit these summers from time to time anyway. Sometimes I think that’s what summer is about, once you get to a certain age and summer mostly just means that it’s the air conditioner that’s on in the office instead of the heater – remembering summers when it meant more than that. But right now they’re haunting me hard. That’s what happens when you visit home, I guess. You walk the country roads, you listen to Strawberry Wine and Chattahoochee and Like A Rock, and you think about the summers when you were young and this was your home.

So what to do? How to put those ghosts to rest? I’m a writer, so I write. I tell the stories of those summers. Except there is no story, exactly. No grand romance or quest. The only adventure in these stories is being young. These stories will be more poetry than prose, trying to capture a feeling instead of a series of events.

Stay tuned.

(And be on the lookout for other, older Stories Of Me. I’ll be importing those from my other blog soon.)

What I’m Working On And What I Plan To Do With It

If there’s anyone reading this blog who’s been following me since the old days at Dreams of the Shining Horizon, you can testify that I don’t post nearly as much here as I did there, at least during the heyday. There’s a reason for that.
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On The Truth of Rock and Roll – Part 1: The Inspiration

I started The Truth of Rock and Roll shortly after my first wife told me we were through.
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Am I Doing This Right?

You Want a Social Life, With Friends

You want a social life, with friends.

A passionate love life and as well

To work hard every day.

What’s true is of these three you may have two

And two can pay you dividends

But never may have three.

There isn’t time enough, my friends–

Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends–

To find the time to have love, work, and friends.

Michelangelo had feeling

For Vittoria and the Ceiling

But did he go to parties at day’s end?

Homer nightly went to banquets

Wrote all day but had no lockets

Bright with pictures of his Girl.

I know one who loves and parties

And has done so since his thirties

But writes hardly anything at all.

—by Kenneth Koch
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My Perfect Life

So I was walking the beach at Coney Island and I figured out my perfect life.

I’m already two-thirds of the way there, believe it or not. I’m happy with where I am and who I’m with. I married the right person, and she seems to think she did too, and that counts for more than anything else. So call it halfway there just with that, with each of the other two things counting for a quarter. The next factor is “where I am”, so suffice it to say that our new apartment is better than we even dared to hope for when we decided to rent it. There’s space and air, storage space in the basement so we don’t have to stuff everything in closets or leave it stacked in corners, a peaceful neighborhood with lots of neat restaurants in it, and it’s all within easy reach of friends and family and parks and our favorite movie theatre and Coney Island. What more could anyone ask for in that regard?

All that’s missing for my perfect life is to be happy with what I do.
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Opening the Ocean at Coney Island – 2018

I had a mystical experience at the shoreline of Coney Island yesterday.

I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures or movie clips for you. But when you’re in the midst of an experience like that, you can only break it by trying too hard to remember it. My choice was to record it or be in it, and I chose to be in it.

For the record, my general spiritual beliefs can best be described as “heretic”. Enough to make my religious friends worry about my soul, while at the same time making my irreligious friends worry about my reason. In my mind, traditional religions can’t bear the weight of their own history and sins. Even so, I’ve felt power and truth in a lot of places, like an empty chapel in the silence of the night, a room full of Irish people praying the rosary at my grandfather’s wake…and what I experienced yesterday.
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