BENCH, A Story of Wonder

By Galen Garwood

"A timeless tale about the magic of Mother Nature and how long after humans pass, the trees, rivers and other bodies of water remain and carry on with their business. Reminiscent of Silverstein's "The Giving Tree", Bench is a tree that becomes a log that becomes a bench that speaks to those who touch it and keeps on giving generation aft

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marrowstone Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780578360256

Galen Garwood

GALEN GARWOOD was born in 1944 and spent most of his young life growing up on St. Simons Island, Georgia and in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1966, after one year of art at University of Georgia, he moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, where he majored in Art and Music with a minor in English. He moved to Seattle, Washington in 1971 and began exhibiting his paintings at Foster-White Gallery in 1973. He has exhibited his paintings in the United States, Europe, and Asia and his creative contributions have also been expressed in writing, poetry, multimedia and film. In 1976 he won First Place in Painting at the Pacific Northwest Annual Exhibition and in 1979 he received the the Hassam, Speicher Award at the Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, New York. In 1995, his multimedia piece 'Adagio' won the Bronze Award at the International Multimedia Film Festival in Philadelphia, and in 1996 'Adagio'was included in the Venice Biennale's 'Xenograhia, Nomadic Wall' and again at 'Art Affair' in New York. His film 'Cadmium Red Light received First Place for Narrative/Documentary at the Port Townsend International Film Festival in 2007 and his film 'Ed and Ed' received the First Place Award for Short Documentary for at DeReel Film Festival in Australia in 2008. Along with American poet, Sam Hamill, he published Passport, paintings and poems, published by Broken Moon Press in 1987 and Mandala, monotypes and poems, an Homage to Morris Graves, Milkweed Editions, In 2011, he published The One-Winged Body, a series of figurative photographs with poems by Peter Weltner, and the following year, again with Peter Weltner, Where Everything Is Water As Far As He Can See, Marrowstone Press. In 2014 his Maenam (Water) series of photographs were published with poems by William O'Daly, Marvin Bell, Sam Hamill, James Broughton, Peter Weltner, Linda Gregg, Emily Warn, and Jeanne Morel, as MAENAM, of Water, Of Light, Marrowstone Press. A selection from a new series of photographs, 'The Dream Sea,' is featured in The Road to Isla Negra, poems by William O'Daly, published by Folded Word Press in 2015. Other images from 'The Dream Sea' are in a published collaboration with poet, Peter Weltner, entitled Water's Eye, Brick House Books, 2015. Since 2002, he has been living in Northern Thailand.

Book preview

BENCH

A Story of Wonder

by

Galen Garwood

For the child in all of is.

Marrowstone Press

INTRODUCTION

I began writing Bench, A Story of Wonder eleven years ago, during a hiatus from making visual art, the main artery of my creative impulses. It was meant to be a short story, one of several I’d been working on, but priority-bound to a painting schedule, I would put Bench aside when a roomful of empty canvases demanded my attention. These visual journeys can take anywhere from three to seven months. Between series of paintings, I typically return to other creative projects, especially writing.

I was excited each time I returned to Bench; it was like visiting old friends one hasn’t seen in a good long while. The main characters in the narrative—Ambrus, Döm, Hjalmar, and Bench—always seem glad I’ve returned, no doubt hoping for the ending. Of course, they could have been shaping the story themselves while I was busy putting pigment to canvas. Whimsical musings? Yes. But even in my visual expressions, a painting will decide when to breathe on its own—demanding a shock of yellow, insisting on a field of diminished blue, or desperate for a balancing shape at the bottom. There’s always the urge for a simple line implied. So too with writing: imagination leaps across boundaries of time and predictability. Earlier in my painting career, whenever I was asked how long a specific canvas took to complete, my answer would be my age at the time. How could it be otherwise? In this regard, Bench is in its seventy-seventh year.

BENCH, A Story of Wonder is about an unusual friendship between a young boy and an elderly, homeless man whose magical stories entwine the boy’s imagination. More broadly, Bench is about our relationship to planet Earth and the sacredness of water, which is, I believe, both medium and vessel of our universal, collective memory, and, in the story, as Ambrus explains to Döm, Every raindrop has made the most important journey and each one that falls reflects our entire world.

Chapter One THE OLD MAN

The old man sits on a weather-beaten bench half covered in mud at the edge of the river. His bearded face, bronzed by the sun, etched by wind and rain, turns to the sky, his pale blue eyes scanning clouds for signs of rain. He eats a meager meal of stale bread with a bit of cabbage or a potato he’s gleaned from the waste of others. When night falls, he curls into his tattered sleeping bag at the foot of the bench. In winter, when rains come, flooding his campsite, the old man abandons his favorite spot and seeks shelter on higher ground, beneath a thicket of river birch and red maple.

Every Saturday, in the wee hours of the morning, he meanders from his camp into Tazia and searches for a week’s supply of food. Years earlier, some of the townsfolks were kind enough to leave a bit of bread, wilted vegetables, and sometimes a few sweets wrapped and left in front of their houses. But no longer; no one seems to care. No hellos. No smiles of kindness. Are the townspeople simply too busy these days? Are they afraid of him? Does their frantic pace of coming and going disallow a simple nod of recognition? The old man, it seems, is merely part of the scenery, nothing more than another hungry pigeon fluttering down to the sidewalk.

In the afternoon, he visits the old town square in the city’s center. Here once pulsed the heart of the village and her people, but now it’s only a stain of trash—empty bottles, beer cans, discarded plastic, and paper; so much litter, even the weeds struggle to find enough light to grow.

The old man putters about, picking up as much trash as he can, filling his burlap sack, hauling it to the nearest recycling bin, sifting and sorting, keeping what he can use for himself—food, old clothing, a tattered blanket now and again, discarded boots—tossing the rest. When he completes his mission at the square, he trundles down the street, searching for other offerings.

Once in a while, he encounters a rowdy gang of boys trolling the back alleys, looking for a bit of excitement. Whenever they cross his path, they tease the old man relentlessly, weaving in and out of his shadow like young jackals in search of fun, assaulting him with a barrage of childish taunts, dancing around him in a circle of mischief, poking at his sack with sticks. Soon enough, they get bored, scatter, then skirmish away in boisterous pursuit of more exciting challenges. The old man pays them no mind whatsoever, secretly amused at their clattering jibes. He continues ambling through the city, slowly circling back toward the river, always on the same schedule, arriving at his camp before darkness.

Chapter Two THE BOY

For his thirteenth birthday, Dömötör Lantos wants nothing more than to go fishing. It isn’t the catching of fish as much as being on the banks of the Ametros River, watching reflections of water dance beneath and through the boughs of trees, the smell of the forest, and the sounds of small creatures inhabiting the woodlands—the whistling song of the sprosser, the croaking of frogs, and the raspy cellos of insects. Döm, as he prefers to be called, will spend an entire afternoon hidden in deep grass, his thoughts spinning