Of Time and Turtles: Reflections Upon the Gardener’s (Never Mind Which) Birthday

              It’s been a long time since I completed one of these Bobs, but actually I had started this one, which is about TIME, in what I thought was TIME to be printed around my birthday in early August.  But TIME got away from me, being as I have to work all the damn TIME … Well, I’ll shut up and let you read it, we ain’t got TIME for this ….

Of Time and Turtles:  Reflections Upon the Gardener’s (Never Mind Which) Birthday 

By Robin Ford Wallace

            This is a story Stephen Hawking used to open his A Brief History of Time:

            A scientist was giving a lecture on the nature of the universe when an old lady in the audience objected to his theories, insisting that the earth rested on the back of a giant turtle. 

“Then what, dear lady,” he said indulgently, “is the turtle itself resting on?”

“You’re clever, young man,” she replied.  “But it’s no use:  It’s turtles all the way down.”

            I was thinking about time because in August I had to add another digit to my already unthinkable age.  It defies belief.  As far as I can tell I’m still the same old chocolate-stained kid playing quietly in the dirt; but AARP keeps sending me these stupid letters.

            And I was thinking about turtles because I used a turtle story myself to open a column in late 2011 about the apocalypse predicted for 2012 by the Mayans (which as far as I can tell didn’t happen) and the horrors my triskaidekaphobia warned me of for 2013 (which continue to unfold).

Remember the story?  A turtle gets mugged by a gang of snails, but he can’t remember details because it happened so fast?  Well, here we are almost through 2013 and I feel like the turtle.  It’s all a blur!

 Someone once told me that people like me, who don’t have children, perceive time differently from people like her, who do.  I conceded that that might be true, that I’d noticed that my childless friends and I seem, even in middle age, always to be going to parties or attending lectures or dancing in the streets, as if anxious to pack in the maximum amount of fun per second; whereas people like her, whose children are now young adults, seem more serene about the passage of time, as if their bodies sense their replicated DNA is now cruising around swilling beer so they don’t have to.
(I should add here that the description of my life as one mad moveable feast may have been a slight exaggeration, a defensive reaction to the phrase “people like you, who don’t have children.”  I’m fulfilled enough, I reckon, but between ourselves it’s not really all cafés and bullfights.  In fact I miss that deck they had at the old Jo Mama’s, where you could sit and watch the traffic go by on Highway 11.  Them was the days!)  

            Anyway, I took the idea seriously enough to check out the Hawking book, which does make a case for subjectivity.  It was all stuff like: if a man throws a ball in a train car and another man is on the platform watching through the window as the train zooms through the station, doesn’t the distance traveled by the ball and thus its speed, and thus time itself, depend on where you’re standing?

It all makes a girl faintly seasick but so does time.  Nothing seems to be happening at all, but look away for one minute and there you are growing hairs out of your chin and getting called “ma’am” by the bagboys at Ingle’s.  (God, I hate that.  On the whole I’d rather be called Fatso, or Stinky.)

But I don’t think it’s just me.  I think it’s the same for everybody.  In a radio retrospective I heard, the narrator said the year 1913 was considered the beginning of the modern era because that was when people began feeling that time was moving too fast.  Cars and airplanes were coming in, and Darwin’s theories; and in Paris the Eiffel Tower was considered so offensively new that the writer de Maupassant ate lunch there every day because it was the only place in town he couldn’t see it.
Change has certainly kept up breakneck since then, and we like to talk about “a simpler time.”  But when?  The Victorian Age?  In the Sherlock Holmes novels, the great detective starts out sending telegraphs and riding in hansoms but by the end there are telephones, automobiles and World War I.
I bet even in the Middle Ages, when they say nothing changed for a thousand years, things were still never the way they used to be.  I bet folks complained, “Dang!  Every time you look around they’ve changed these iron maidens again, so you don’t know how to kill people no more.”
Anyway, if you had a time machine that really could deliver you to what you consider “a simpler time,” say, May 1, 1532, at 4:30 p.m., you’d only be there a minute before it was 4:31, then May 2, and pretty soon you’d be growing hairs out of your chin and the peasants would start addressing you as “prithee, good dam” or whatever they called hags back then.
Our impulse is to try and outrun time, and the Hawking book did say time slows down as you approach the speed of light.  

But I think maybe there’s some kinky kind of truth in the fable of the turtle winning the race against the rabbit.  It’s the slow things that do seem to triumph in the end, like this volunteer gourd vine in my vegetable patch that may sooner or later swallow the sun.  I never see it move at all but it’s subsumed the entire garden. 

(I don’t mind, really.  It’s been an awful gardening year and the tomatoes had already stopped.  I’m just warning you to look out for that gourd vine, that’s all.  I think it’s moving north.)

And time doesn’t seem to go anywhere either but it’s got me feeling like that turtle, something slow and stodgy that’s been run down by something even slower, that travels on snot.

            I don’t really have an answer to this eternal problem but we’ve got to stop here anyway.

            We’re out of time.

END