The Connect

A former Wall Street power player in the financial world, finds himself haplessly meandering the streets in his stained and tattered business clothes, as a bumbling drunkard who sheepishly denies his existence as a poorly practiced homeless person. Henry Galloway is young enough to start his life over with success, if he puts the work into it. But he is far too old to learn how to survive on the streets without help from those who know the life and how to survive it. But first, he has to admit what he has become and how he got to that level of existence. And he can only do that by accepting help from those who he once (and still) judges as ‘beneath him’. As Henry staggers through his failed panhandling days, only making enough change to soothe his addiction to alcohol, his black outs fade into flashes of his deceptive financial dealings and deep recollections of childhood. Henry fixates on his idealized visions of his mother smiling endearingly at him, the simplicity of the family farm house, and flashes of his stern, cold father admonishing young Henry when he tried to look in his father’s private storage chest of military gear and family photo albums and journals – leaving Henry to wake each day in deep shame and rejection that he felt from childhood. Henry’s disdain for the common man, the farmer, the laborer, and all who did not wear business attire, began in those farm-house days, and hardened his heart when his mother passed away, leaving him to finish out his teen years with a father with whom he could not fully bond. From a young age, Henry saw a life of money and many miles of distance between himself and a father who he did not respect. Henry is now a delayed adult orphan with no home. Soon, he will be rescued and adopted by a new family on the streets. He is not in a position or state of mind and health, to refuse. Elder is the once-imprisoned and later exonerated aging-Knight, in hand-mended gentlemen’s casual-wear-for-the-wise on the streets. If a back-wood Southerner born of segregated pain could be a man of under-stated royalty, Elder would be that man. A true Sage and source of medicine to remedy body and mind. If not for Elder, Henry Galloway’s path to destiny would not likely show the light of day. Between fierce and coerced battles of Chess under Elder’s bridge area ‘home’ and the lessons of character rehabilitation that surround those moments, Henry and Elder forge a bond that enlivens Henry’s spirit to a spark of potential rebirth of direction in life. Henry fights Elder’s lessons until he can no longer – Henry begins to face the truth of his station in life – a truth that forces him to start seeing humanity in all forms, rich and poor alike. Matty is Elder’s sword of action – without Matty, survival of both Elder and Henry would lay in murky waters, with grave consequences. Matty’s severe mental illness is his own battle within, and yet it is also what ties him to Elder and Henry in the first place – to see his psychoticism as a bad thing, may indeed be a mistake of judgement. Matty’s mind is more beautiful than most, even if a bit dangerous from time to time. Without Matty, Henry’s path to sobriety is dim. With Matty, Henry’s path to sobriety is wrought with joyful tragedy in action with smiles and jolts of fear sometimes intertwined. A deep but comical friendship is forged through Matty’s perfection of madness. Henry’s daily rounds to the local homeless shelter soup kitchen ties him to a secret that Elder holds dear. Elder’s most prized legacy is his granddaughter Samantha – a kind and feisty young woman of philanthropic dedication. Samantha is driven to her work in social services but her direction in life is a mystery even to her, as she knows so little about herself other than her own survivor story and faint memories of her mother’s tragic fall into addiction. Samantha has no idea about Elder, and Elder prefers it that way – with his only goal to make sure Samantha is safe and provided a future – which Elder is hell-bent on seeing to fruition. As Henry is rehabilitated by Elder, Matty, and the valiant souls of the local nonprofit health and social service clinic staff, Henry's true work begins. Coming to terms with both assumed trauma and more traumatic secrets to which has yet to be introduced. Henry is in for an adventure that aims to reclaim a life that he should have followed from the beginning. And this means the requisite of facing his father with a courage he is certain he does not yet possess. Henry spent too many days hiding from his past, from his father, choosing liquor and homelessness as a reprieve from his assumed judgement day with Henry’s father at ‘home’. Elder prepared Henry as best he could. Elder made good on his dedication to his granddaughter Samantha even though she was never afforded the chance to be in Elder’s presence (by Elder’s choice). And Elder made his way to the other side on his terms, to Henry’s alarm, anger, and new pain of loss. Elder’s age and disease process claimed him but on his own terms. Henry would have to walk the rest of the path on his own, with a kindly pointed-lead from Matty, who likewise made sure that Elder’s directions were carried out for both Henry and Samantha. Samantha was provided a large sum of funds upon Elder’s passing – a fund that he sat on and amassed over many-many years, precisely to ensure his granddaughter’s future, be it in school, housing, or whatever she would need. Elder watched her from afar, and he used others such as Matty and Henry to collect details of her progress in life. Elder would not allow more pain to come into Samantha’s life, and he did not ever want to be a burden or a source of worry for her. What she did not know, could not hurt her. Matty drives Henry to the small farm town where Henry was raised. With Henry’s heart pounding, and Matty’s proud smile, as if he were Henry’s older brother sending the younger to finishing school… their paths have to part if Henry is to fully push toward true healing. Matty’s brotherly love and pride leaves Henry sober, terrified, and yet liberated on this return path to a soul-interrupted, on the stomping grounds of his father’s domain. A son’s pain however, is about to be truly illuminated by a truth he never imagined possible. Henry’s life that he thought he knew and understood, is in fact filled with secrets that he has no understanding of – in particular, the power to heal – not just a healing for Henry, but also for his father. Henry slowly enmeshes himself into the local farm town again with sheepish approach but a growing sense of belonging. Town folk indeed do remember Henry and while not ever pulling punches on their loving judgement of his original choice to abandon ‘them’ (the town), they also lend him ample room to ‘come home’ with acceptance and comical engagement. It takes Henry a couple weeks to garner the courage to allow a face to face engagement with his father, and even then, that engagement has to be arranged by a pestering rival of Henry’s father and that rival’s daughter, Lilly (implied potential love interest for Henry, if he plays his cards right). Once the two Galloway men are wrangled into the same room to face one another, Henry’s fears begin to meet his father’s true character – a man who has had his share of pain, a painfully quiet torture, that he is now finally able to share with his long lost son who has returned. Even with Henry’s lessons with Elder, Henry still has some internal arrogance to shed – he thought he could come home and wield his intelligence and financial savvy to offer his father financial gain, in the hopes to off-set the shame of having abandoned his home, father, and town for the promise of city life. To Henry’s surprise, his father has no use for his fancy citified money schemes, as it turns out Henry’s father is quite the genius on his own – an inventor who made good financially on creations that childhood Henry dismissed as silly hobbies that his father ‘tinkered’ with in the back barn. But the bigger alarm for the heart would be the truth about Henry’s path into this world altogether. Henry needed to know the truth behind his father’s cold ways in Henry’s childhood years. And Henry’s father had some answers that both he and Henry needed to share together. Upon inviting Henry to stay in the family farm-house once again after all these years, Henry’s father hands Henry the skeleton key to the upstairs room where that fateful storage chest of memories still waits. No words are said between them, Henry knows what this moment means to both of them – that room once held Henry’s fear of his father’s punishment for looking into the storage chest when it was forbidden, forever and always…. Until now…. Henry’s father waits downstairs in the farm-house kitchen, still outfitted with appliances from the 1950s and 60s (working perfectly thanks to Henry’s father and his ‘tinkering’ ways). Henry’s father smiles through quiet tears as he sits down with a cup of cowboy percolated coffee at his deceased wife’s prized kitchen table. He waits for Henry to put the pieces of the puzzle together. He hopes the truth will help his son, like it is already helping him in this moment of reckoning. Henry reverently enters the storage chest room, opens the chest, respectfully removes the military uniform and gear that rests on top of the family journals. He sees his mother’s writing as he opens the journals – the joyful entry of ‘their’ birth is the first to strike into Henry’s heart as he reads it over and over again. Henry was the surviving twin. His father was sworn to secrecy by Henry’s mother. She never wanted Henry to feel the loss of a sibling (like she had felt as she had lost her sibling early in her own life). That secret, although originally meant to shelter Henry, was actually the seed of the divide between Henry and his father, which would only grow to a poisonous vine separating them as Henry’s father succumbed to his grief of losing his wife, salving his pain with drinking to deal with losing both a child and his wife in the same lifetime. Henry’s father was trapped in secrecy, guilt, shame and failure to garner the respect of his only living family, his son Henry. Henry returns to the kitchen with the skeleton key and he puts his respectful and loving hand on his father’s shoulder. No words. Just two men who now share the truth, without the hardened hearts separating them. Henry now has the foundation to start again, with a life worth living and sharing. He keeps his ties with Matty, Samantha, and others who put him on the path to sobriety, but he now digs in deep to his home farm-town as a peer and mentor to others who have similar addiction battles that he has survived. Lilly doubts Henry’s worth as a farm-hand, but work is work, and she’s now in charge of her family farm business – and she is not be be tangled with if you decide to take on work at ‘her’ farm – Lilly is a gem, but a hard and cutting gem that will put callouses on the hands of Hercules. An honest woman worth following – if Henry is half as smart as he thinks he is, he will keep his mouth shut, pick up a horse-stall shovel, and get to work. It’s time to relearn this thing called life. Henry now sees that happiness is its own reward, and money and power-seeking are poor substitutes for a clean heart.