TeacherScribe

The Lesson

Time. It is one of those unique words in our language that can be a noun (“How much time do we have to shop?”), verb (he timed his jump perfectly), an adjective (a ticking time bomb), and an adverb (her arrival was very timely).

In addition to its various meanings, time, like water, has various states. Sometimes it freezes. Like the moment I saw my wife for the first time - a cheetah cowboy hat, a black skirt, knee high boots, and skin the color of caramel. Other times it is moves at a glacier’s pace. Remember struggling to sleep on Christmas Eve, just knowing those presents were waiting under the tree? Those were some of the longest hours of my life. Time can also rush by. Like when I write. I’ll sit down to my MacBook with a cup of coffee - Caribou Daybreak Blend. After a few moments I’ll stop to take a sip. Only to find the coffee tepid and quite disgusting. I glance at the clock: Fifteen minutes gone. Just like that. Ultimately, time evaporates. Remember your first day of kindergarten? Where exactly did those 12 years go?

While scientists and mathematicians still grapple with time - and its twin - space, artists have a better handle. Dali’s classic “The Persistence of Memory” attempts to render time on canvas. Just look a those three pocket watches melting and distorting. How accurately do our memories record time? How about that black threatening to seep across the entire painting, threatening to drown out everything. For all that we remember, think of all that we have forgotten. Or will forget.

Poets have long grappled with the concept. Frost advises us “Nothing Gold Can Stay” while Robert Herrick warns us in “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time” to “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” Both of these - and countless others - are takes on the Latin term ‘carpe diem,’ which translates as “seize the day.”

Roger Waters of Pink Floyd takes the opposite view of time in their classic song, appropriately titled, “Time.” Unlike the romantics who sought to make the most of every extraordinary moment, Waters, instead, examines the angst and frustration of time’s most sinister side - boredom:

Ticking away the moments
That make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the moments
In an off-hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground
In your hometown
Waiting for someone or something
To show you the way

Who hasn’t felt like that? Especially when you’re young and there is absolutely nothing to do. Or so you think.

Of course, the irony is that when you are young, time is like a slow, lazy river. Just crawling along. Never fast enough. I was feeling just like that in my grandmother’s apartment years ago when she not only taught a five year old to fathom earth’s entire history but to also realize his place as a minute speck on it. That was exactly what my grandmother did one day in late June 1979. I had found that someone to show me the way.

*****

“Okay,” Granny said from the other side of her cramped one bedroom apartment at Fairview Manor. “Just tape the end of the paper to my back door.”

I pressed my thumb to the green metal door at the back of her kitchen. The slice of Scotch tape held firm - two feet below the peep and just a little to the left of the imposing deadbolt lock.
“Now come to the front door,” Granny called from the living room.

I followed the roll of old white calculator tape as it snaked its way out of the kitchen, over the dining room table where it nearly snagged in the fake bowl of plastic fruit in the middle, around the green leather recliner, and finally past the TV.

Granny stood at her front door. She had spent the past few minutes drawing and writing on the roll of paper before propping the pencil behind an ear. She held the dwindling roll of paper in one hand and a single strip of tape in the other. Then - wincing just a bit from her arthritis - she gripped the paper with her swollen hands and with a sharp yank from her bulging knuckle, she tore the paper free from the roll, which she then tucked into her front pocket. Then she applied the Scotch tape, adhering the other end to the front door.

“Now this will help us view earth’s history in perspective. The piece you stuck to the back door is the beginning of the earth. The piece I stuck to the front door is present day,” she instructed.
I turned and looked at the tape as it stretched back over the TV, by the recliner, past the fake bowl of fruit, and around the corner into the kitchen where it disappeared.

“Now let’s walk back and check the marks,” she said.

Looking closer at the tape, I realized, sure enough, there were pencil marks several feet apart on the paper.

“These, my dear,” Granny said in the tone that meant she was teaching me something important, “are all the eras in earth’s history.”

She stopped at the dinning room table, where the first era in earth’s history ended. Granny pulled out a chair. She bent down to my perspective and said, “Look at the beginning of the things.”

I did.


“As you can see,” Granny said from beside me, “the longest period in earth’s history, the Precambrian period, lasts all the way from the back door to the dining table here. That was the period the earth was cooling and preparing for life. Imagine each foot of tape is - oh - a thousand million years.”

“But most of the tape is taken up by it!”

“Yes. It roughly makes up about 90 percent of earth’s history. Just think of how long it took for the most basic forms of life to begin.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes. So much white tape where there was no life on earth at all! It certainly put my measly five years on it in perspective.

Granny noticed my awe. She gave it a few seconds to sink in. Then she spoke in my ear. “That is why I think God created life on earth.”

I turned to look at her.

“It must have been so lonely.”

That made sense to me.

“Now, come with me,” she said close to my ear and moved from the table. We inched our way along the tape, leaving that stretch of 10 or 12 feet of empty time behind us.

“Things began to change,” she said as I looked at the strange words scrawled onto the tape. “More complex forms of life began to flourish. The Precambrian era ended and the Paleozoic began. At this point it is believed that all of the continents were joined into one large landmass. It was at this point that the dinosaurs – your favorites – began to arise.”

We then ventured a little farther, stopping in front of the TV. “Here is your favorite period.”
From all the hours Granny spent reading me articles from the National Geographics and buying me a small horde of plastic dinosaurs, I knew she was right. I looked on top of the TV and saw that she had placed my favorites - T-Rex and Stegosaurus - on top next to the word “Jurassic.”
“See how long this period lasted?”

I nodded as I saw the more recent eras blocked off into shorter periods that only measured a few inches. Things were getting interesting now.

“During the Cretaceous period, the dinosaurs began to die out.”

I followed the tape over the TV and the bookshelf, where several dinosaurs were tipped over. I nodded as I realized I was witnessing the downfall of the dinosaurs.

“But it seems like the dinosaurs lived so long ago,” I said, eyeing the tape as it was quickly running out, for the front door was just a few inches away. “We’re almost at the end!”
Granny cracked a broad smile.

“Okay, stand here at the front door,” she said steering me toward it. “This marks the most current era in earth’s history where the earth cooled because of the Ice Age and homo sapiens came into the picture.”

“But you don’t have anything written down for them . . . I mean us!”

“Just wait,” she said. “From our place in the present, look back at all of earth’s history.”

I followed the tape from the front door over the bookshelf and to the TV. So much for the dinosaurs.

Then I watched as it wound toward the dining room table. The Paleozoic era.

Finally, I saw how the majority of the tape belonged to the blank – and mostly lifeless -- Precambrian era. Indeed, how lonely it must have been for all those years.

“So where are we?” I asked, turning back to the front door and peering at the tape.

Granny gave me her I-am-glad-you-asked-me-that smile and snatched the pencil out from behind her ear.

“We my dear,” she said with the pencil poised, ”are right here.”

With a flick of her wrist, she snapped the thinnest of lines across the very edge of the tape. It was so slight that I had to look close to even see it.

“That’s it?”

“Yep. There’s not even enough room to write homo sapiens.”

I stared at the line.

“So whenever we like to think we humans are so high and mighty,” she said grinning and propping the pencil back behind her ear, “just remember our little lesson here.”

****

Indeed, I have. For there has not been a day in the 31 years since this little lesson in time that I have not thought about time in this way. There’s just something both motivating and humbling thinking about all of recorded history as a quick slash of a pencil. And my time here is a just the tiniest of smudges on that line.