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What now?

A friend of mine recently chided me for pointing out an interesting pattern of cracks in the sidewalk in front of her condo.

“For god’s sake, G, they’re just cracks! Get a life, eh?”

I think she mistook my curiosity as a criticism of the neighbourhood where she lived. Although I was not particularly enamoured with the locality, I tried to diffuse the situation by explaining that I sometimes feel a need to examine curious and often unnoticed things which have slipped beneath the radar of those who encounter them each day without a thought.

I don’t think paying attention to stuff like that changes my place on the spectrum or anything, it’s just that now I’m retired, my curiosity seems to escape its usual leash. I suspect that’s always been a problem, though -curiosity I mean, not the leash. But, let’s face it, Age allows previously disguised idiosyncrasies to surface without the usual societal constraints. It frees me to think more widely and mull things over so I can taste them at my leisure. It wasn’t always that way, however. There was a time when my idle thoughts were considered disruptive. Abnormal.

When I was a child, for example, I remember being fascinated by the boundaries of now. When did it start? When did it end? I don’t think I lived in an eternal now, or anything: there were yesterdays, there were supper-times, and there were the prospects of weekends coming up when I didn’t have to go to school -but those were all different from now; they were all somehow distinct. Still, even in my early years in school, I wondered about how long a now was supposed to last, and when, exactly, it began its life as a now.

I remembered being puzzled -argumentative even- one time in Grade 1 or 2 when a teacher caught me pulling the hair of the girl sitting in the desk in front of me and told me to stand up. And then, when I naively protested my innocence she stamped her foot and demanded that I ‘Stand up Now!’ She didn’t seem to understand that since I was still sitting in my now, any further action would involve a different now. A future now, that really wasn’t a now yet. I tried to explain my reasoning, but all the kids laughed at me, and I seem to remember even my teacher smiling at my seemingly extemporaneous excuse.

Of course, to most people -especially teachers- that sounds silly, I suppose: a clever, yet totally inadequate defence. But I don’t think I was particularly precocious or anything; I doubt if I even thought I was being difficult -okay, maybe a little. I suspect I was simply in the process of sorting through the metaphysical ramifications of a concept that mystified me then -and even in my current now .

I suppose that begs the question of whether any of my nows today are actually related to any of my previous nows. Does a future now even have anything to do with one that occurred many years (or seconds, for that matter) before? And how could I ever know? What evidence could I bring to bear? Am I even the same person from one now to the next? Related, perhaps, but if each now is unique, can I be completely the same…?

Whoaa. Maybe I could resort to the same mechanism art dealers use to establish correct attributions: provenance. But then again, who actually owns a now? And if it’s a different person each time -if I am somehow actually a different person each time- then attribution falls apart doesn’t it…?

My mother once showed me an old black and white photograph of me when I was a little child; she’d found it in an envelope she’d stored with some other memories in a drawer in her bedroom. I’d never seen it before, and when I asked, she couldn’t remember when or where it was taken. She remembered the outfit I’d been wearing -it was evidently a hand-me-down from my older brother, but because he’d never had curly hair, she was sure it was not him. I was her only other child, so that narrowed it down considerably.

Still, it bothered her that she couldn’t remember the circumstances, and handed me the picture to inspect. Perhaps she thought my closer examination might jog a memory buried deep inside my brain. But still, the child was as equally strange to me as to her until I recognized the cowboy hat hanging from a leather strap around his neck and almost concealed behind him on his back.

Memories of my Roy Rogers’ hat came flooding back. I’d received the hat instead of a toy gun and holster set I had really wanted for my birthday the year I turned eight. I’m surprised my mother hadn’t recognized it. Then again, it was my now, not hers I suppose, and surprisingly, at that moment, I was able to reconstruct the picture being taken, and the circumstances surrounding it: my disappointment of not finding the holster set when I unwrapped the gift, and the attempt to smile for my father who was taking the picture on his Kodak Brownie. I even remember deciding that although I was disappointed, I was still really proud of the hat and figured I could probably wear it outside instead of my toque while I played in the snow.

It was as if I was suddenly my younger self in the now of his moment of deciding to wear it outside. I remember my mother and father discussing whether or not it was a good idea, and my father saying “Well, if it’s too cold for him, he’ll come back inside pretty soon.”

I mean, I was suddenly present in that moment 70 years ago. Was I inhabiting the same now as that eight year old… or had it already morphed into a then -whatever that is?

Now that is a very interesting question; a new question that I’m only now coming to grips with: what actually constitutes a then? Is it a one-of-a-kind thing, or is it somehow shareable? Do my feelings of inhabiting the moment of that eight year old in the picture become a then, or merely a borrowed now? For a moment, I actually was that child, was living in that child, was living as that child. Or is that just imagining something that may not be a valid recollection: a retrospective falsification of a memory that could not actually be his now…?

I wonder if any memories, even living, breathing ones- can ever access the original now?

There’s so much to think about now, eh? I seldom disappoint myself…

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