What is the Past, and Why?

Our friends were out of town and had graciously loaned us their home while ours was being bombed for termites—a species we’ve completely conquered in the Darwinian Race To the Top^®, except for the poison-filled circus tents we’re occasionally obliged to flee with our belongings. On the third day the tent was removed and that night we returned home with our stuff, victorious. We win this round, you dumb bugs! We were couch-sprawled and glad to be home. A few vanquished termites lay here and there about the place in chitinous repose—little Xs for eyes and tiny legs aimed skyward, like in a Warner Bros cartoon. I pondered the penetrating mystery of living things and got the broom. 

I realized with horror we’d left our fish, a mirror-hating Betta, on our friend’s porch up there in the darkling foothills. I pictured the poor creature adrift in his bowl, terrified and helpless in a strange neighborhood, pressed in-upon by the dome of densely packed stars, besieged by an advancing circle of jackals, lemurs, fish-desiring impala, and other ravenous creatures of the Santa Barbara bestiary. I drove like Vin Diesel or someone up into the hilly suburbs and nabbed the little guy, placing the partially drained bowl on the dark passenger-side floor. Coming home, I made a centrifugally ill-advised u-turn in front of our condo and in my darkened car the fishbowl slid and overturned, the contents loudly fanning out under the passenger seat with a sound like a course slushy being hurled along a sidewalk. “Hhhaaaauugghhh!!” I cried.

Soon enough I was gingerly pawing through fishbowl gravel on the soaked floorboard of my car with one hand, holding aloft my glaring cell phone light with the other. My daughter had heard me screech to a stop and ran out to see what was happening. “Where the hell is the fish?!” I screamed at her over my shoulder. She took a half-step back. “Dad…it’s okay.” I imagined our Betta suffocating and confused and frightened. I madly searched for him as a tipsy divorcé might search for a desiccated boutonniére.  

I found him in a remote corner of the underseat—out of his element and surreal as a Duchamp in the blare of my cell phone light. Outside the watery, magnifying environment of his bowl he looked like a matte-finished purple apostrophe. Standing on his tail like Flipper, he was covered with car-filth and leaning against a greasy black spring of some kind. He was alive and his fish-frown had deepened. I felt a flood of relief I can neither explain nor describe, and broke into an idiotic, teary smile. His little silver eye moved minutely in its socket and fixed me with a stare as if to say “Oh, hello jackass”. 

This life is piercing. 

Haunted Tilt-a-Whirl

This wrecked world is haunted by questions. None of the good ones are rhetorical: if we’re native to this solar system, why is our star such a potent carcinogen? Would Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorménow and again lean back in sumptuous, vermouth-informed reverie and actually discuss their triumphs, regard their trophies and show-business honorifics by late-afternoon desert light, or would they merely reconnoiter in a somber, common silence? How do bustlingly crowded churches and pediatric cancers share the same possibility space? Whence the friendly hand-holding Ghost?

It’s a fact that Life is fluorescing around us in a cyclonic rage of unapprehended sound and fury (as has been noted), the grasses bursting upward, the birds yelling, airplanes spitting fire and heat, snails crunching noisily along littered forest floors, their ridiculous eyestalks waving around to no Darwinian avail. Cars collide and carom all over the world, even as quantum whatnots (…wave! No, wait! particle!…) do much the same thing, but with less visibly dramatic effect. You wouldn’t ordinarily guess at the presence of the roiling craziness we inhabit. In this doozy of an astral plane you can be holding hands to the accompaniment of birdsong one hour, and in the next be fleeing a pack of hungry hyenas across the savannah. This all falls under the category “Glory,” and rightly so. 

But (oh my Word) also this. Some time ago at the red Naugahyde-booth restaurant – so reminiscent of the Officer’s Clubs of my AFB youth – the restaurant’s nattily costumed proprietor was making the rounds. In his superfluous and ceremonial red vest, he stopped along a highball-and-plate-littered table to speak to a man dining gingerly, and somewhat awkwardly, with his elderly mother, several tables distant from my own rust-freckled Naugahyde vestibule. In the sepia bath of the beveled faux chandeliers, the scene was without sound but not without effect. 

The proprietor engaged the man’s mother in conversation, placing his hand on her shoulder as would a congenial confidant. She tilted her beautiful face to receive him and I saw that her expression was suddenly alight. Her lovely eyes blazed at this sincere businessman, blazed with utter, unguarded delight. Not with a simple explicable smile, but with a clear, radiant and eternal expression of bliss, an absolute incandescence, a contagion. 

Then her grown son’s own face, as he watched the proprietor lean into his brittle and ecstatic old mom, became beatific. It was a circuit. He saw our god, such as He is. In the restaurants and driveways and parlors and living rooms, and on the graying daylit street corners of this sometimes-bewildering burst of color and feeling, He roams in His approximate loving beauty, in this instance wearing a red vest, striding purposefully  along (and probably a millimeter or so above) a covertly beer-stained carpet. 

Blockhead Universe

The Block Universe theory (also called Eternalism) posits that space-time is an unchanging four-dimensional “block,” that the past and future are as extant as the present – reality as an enormous lucite cube, past, present and future locked inside like the cartoon characters in a truck stop curio. The past we recall is behind us, has not been obliterated, and can be revisited – if we could just come up with the means. My dad passed in 1993, my mom in 2014. Sometimes in a moment of quietude I see all the receding moments back there, and I walk into the TV room and my old bedroom, and my little brother’s corner bedroom where I’d painted a really cool Starship Enterprise on his wall, shuttlecraft in the foreground. I walk through all the rooms, hours and days in the sunlit house on Mulberry Street. I stare at all the moments and quantum forks and so on. 

The past is immutable, but we desperately yearn. We can see those moments in the mind’s eye, the imagery and sense memory clear as a bell; but getting back there (we’re assured by scientists with straight faces) involves unimaginable energies and faster-than-light velocities – and a bunch of other wholly unreasonable cosmological barriers to closure. May the indescribable power of the vast universe be marshalled on my behalf for this one little thing.

I lie awake. I dare not pray but I ask: Zeus or Vishnu or Yahweh, or whatever robed Titan runs this place – if I could maybe go back to the family room on Mulberry? For two or three minutes? I’d really appreciate it. I won’t ask again.