Crossing the Space-Time Continuum - By Toyota 2-26-10

Anderson, South Carolina

One of the most celebrated books of the science fiction genre has to be Jules Verne’s 19th century classic The Time Machine. In this fanciful tale an eccentric professor working in a Victorian lab constructs a machine that allows one to traverse the boundaries of time. A wishful traveler can pierce the mystery that is the future or return to the solidified history of the past and remake decisions. One can simply pull or push a polished brass lever on Verne’s temporal chariot and change the world.

How many of us would give anything to go back but a single time and redo a decision based on the knowledge we acquired with the passing of time? We could all become multi-millionaires simply by having the knowledge needed to plow all of our money into a single stock trade, knowing what the future held. We would find ourselves suddenly free of the boundaries of financial limitation.

Perhaps more significantly, we could take back bitter words of regret. How many of us would give anything to return a single time and take back searing angry words that set fire to precious relationships, leaving them forever a smoldering residue of ash? How many wars could have been pre-empted if angry words could be taken back?

To not have gotten on a doomed flight. The stories of chance surrounding the breakup and loss of Air France’s Airbus in mid 2009 were sobering. A business man is alive because his taxi made a wrong turn. Others died because they arrived in the Brazilian airport early and hopped on Air France to get home early. Every time we board a plane it seems we are entering into a strange sort of cosmic game of chance. If Jules Verne had been writing non-fiction instead of science fiction, perhaps our lives would be much better. We could go back and tell people to change their bookings, to take another flight, to marry someone else.

One of my favorite things to do is to set up computers and projection in a black box theater in an elementary magnet school and show fourth graders cosmic wonders. As part of their science curriculum, each year I am asked to come in the winter and do an eighty minute presentation on the curiosities and wonders of the planet Mars. Yes, one hundred twenty five kids stay rapt, attentive, and well behaved for eighty minutes without a break. It is true that children are the most prodigious learning machines in the universe, if given something to study that interests them. There is nothing like feeding the elation that comes across kids’ faces when they find the universe a really cool place.

Seventy or eighty years away there is another universe, one that is often dark, cold, lonely, and devoid of wonder. Here time takes on a different texture. Children are not reaching their potential, having long faded away into their occluded memories. A second tier nursing home houses those who did not make the jack pot stock trade in real time or got on the wrong career flight. Those who are medically indigent without the funds for a better facility come to this austere place that advertises, “Take your place in life.”

In five minutes I drove my old Toyota Corolla from the celestial magic of that magnet school to the dark reality of an ancient facility stinking of urea, feces, and age. There I found many anomalies. A man, rapt, who looked as if he once was a CEO, was sitting barefoot on the floor in the hall, exploring with his gnarled fingers the boundaries of a twelve inch floor tile. His universe had shrunk down to that 144 square inch speck of space/time, devoid of any dignity. I nearly wept.

Many darkened rooms contain mounds shrouded in thin semi-white blankets. Enshrined in each is an ossuary containing a lifetime of memories, dreams, and regrets. My ‘usual’ destination is on the far side of this nebula of despair and the wreckage of time, often giving me pause to learn far more about what matters in life than I ever could hope to teach those fourth graders.

Physicists like to tell us the universe is winding down and that one day in the distant future it will become essentially extinct in an entropyless void. Everything will have the same absolute zero temperature and all will be dark and frozen. A journey in Jules’ time machine to this era would be bleak at best. After navigating around the black holes of disability in the forsaken place across town, it would be easy to take the physicists declarations as harsh non-fiction. It would seem that our lives wind down to nothing.

Perhaps there is another deeper reality. I go to the far end of the galaxy to room 24, a tiny dim little cell containing a metal locker, battered dresser, old bed, and a small sink bolted to the wall. There I speak to a shroud in the bed, energized by 140 DB of deafening sonic pressure from an old TV. Arousing, finding the remote, she brings blessed silence to her tiny darkened cell. This shroud contains nearly a century of life, now-forgotten, a life once huge and vibrant, building community all around her. Now it’s just the two of us.

I proceed to do her ‘gardening.’ Bringing new flowers, weeding out dead ones from days gone by, washing out the vases, I challenge the physicists, raising the entropy of her region of the world. Her spirits rise just a bit. She hasn’t seen anything really alive in a while. Yellow and white daisies are hardy survivors, lasting three weeks or more in the harsh environments of the forgotten.

Perhaps even more energizing than flowers or 140 db of sound pressure is a little elixir of Hope. We have forthright conversation with the One who knows our future and our past. We remind each other of the promises that are beyond the reaches of The Time Machine. We are promised that all those things cast in stone in the past will be redeemed, that all those things veiled in the future will be revealed. Suddenly, my dear friend is seeing beyond the ninety-something paralyzed shriveled body that has imprisoned her. I see Hope and Joy erupt in her eyes. Gratitude for the Promises flood over us, washing away the tincture of despair that so easily besets us.

Perhaps Verne’s work is not fiction after all. I jumped time today in my old Toyota and found Hope in the future. So did an inmate, a prisoner of time.

I know the thoughts I have for you, thought for good, not for evil; Plans that will give you hope and a future.

For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.