Thursday, January 18, 2007

Travel Time?

A long time ago, in a city not so far away, I was six. It was lunchtime recess, and a second grader had gathered quite a large crowd by doing ten complete pull-ups on the jungle gym. I had never tried such a thing and determined to do so, I jumped up and grabbed hold of the bar as soon as he dropped panting to the ground. Some of the youngsters I had cut in front of protested with mumbles, then let their attention be diverted by everyone's favorite new toy, the brightly colored Butterfly Duncan Yo-Yo. I kicked my body weight to the left and the right as I had seen him do, then gave a tug to place my chin above the bar as seemed the custom.
I was very surprised and delighted to find my body springing up by simply directing my will through my arms and hands. I'm guessing that all that hanging from the shower curtain rod (when I was supposed to be taking a bath) had prepared me. I threw myself into it, marveling at the way my body accommodated the added strain of each repetition. The five or so friends that had resisted the brightly colored Butterfly Duncan Yo-Yos cheered me on. I had reached "thirty -three" and was heaving and shaking. I felt some sort of accolade was due, perhaps a ceremony with a small pendant to wear around my neck so the world could understand what I had accomplished.
Alas, the bell rang and my spectacular pull-up demo was forgotten as quickly as those demon brightly colored Butterfly Duncan Yo-Yos.
The kids all ran for the big gray concrete stairs back up into our prison, um, school. I plopped down from the bar to dash up the stairs with them and discovered what I later learned was called adrenaline. I was so pumped from the pull-ups, I had to be up those stairs first, despite the fact two hundred kids had a head start on me. I had pushed and shoved to halfway up, when somebody's retaliatory leg tripped me in mid-flight. The fall from three feet to zero feet couldn't have been all that slow, but it I remember it as taking... all... after...noon. My sense of time was completely warped and all I could hear was my own voice in my head saying, "Today's the Day that you knock your front tooth out".
Sure enough... and that wasn't the last time that happened.
A beach in San Fransisco, an attic in Minneapolis, a ravine in Seattle, many times my brain whisperer has said "Today's the Day that...".
It's beyond deja vu, it's more like Slaughterhouse Five in that there is this feeling of time travel and a sense of time itself being verrrry static all at once. There is this quantum theory of time that basically says,
"Every moment that you have ever experienced has always existed and always will. The seconds of your life are like the pages of a book that have "been" forever, will "be" forever and are referenced in a particular chronological order only as a matter of computational convenience for your poor limited fleshy brain."
Is it possible that small children and the senile elderly are not constrained in their views of their own "books" the way responsible adults are?
Maybe when Grandad thinks it's 1963, it actually is. When little kids talk about "when they were grownup" they aren't kidding.
Ya just never know, but hey, you can try to know.
All Praise Be to the Flying Spaghetti Monster and His Prophet Darwin.

Ramen.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice. Now I want to hear about the beach, the attic and the ravine.
-S