A Real Brief Explanation of Time
Two Toke Tom asked me the other day why in holy hell do I write these stories. “Live in the moment, Skeeter,” he advised. “Let the past be the past.” Two Toke is a disciple of Be Here Now, living in the Eternal Moment. I could make the argument — and I do — that I’m just allowing the Past to live alongside the Present, but T.T. isn’t buying. To him, the past isn’t prologue, it’s just prolonged, at least by guyz like me.
He’s got a point, but I long ago stopped looking for Enlightenment. The world is a mystery to me and so be it. I guess I have a fondness, though, for what came before. I keep my old shack, I preserve my old stories. I figure nobody much cares, but history means something to me. The newcomers to the South End see the mizzus and me now as Old Timers, anachronistic pioneers on an island where the pioneers vanished long ago. Who cares who lived in the old Nesje house? Who cares if the little building south of us was the Bucklin Store? Who gives a damn if Bernie Road was named after Bernie Dallman and Dallman Road was too. The man is dead and gone and so what if his kinfolks are still here? It’s not like he was a famous war hero. Just a name on some roadsigns to the newcomers.
But there are ghosts among us. There are, I tell Two Toke after the 3rd or 4th, ripples in the continuum. Toss a stone in the pond and it eventually comes back. Tom smiles his Cheshire Cat smile and chuckles from across his kitchen table. We go back a long ways, Tom and me. We go back to when we both first came to the South End, two drifters looking for a future. I guess Tom found the present … and me, I found that too. Time is the great Trickster is what I think, but Tom and I both found what we were looking for, we just took different paths to getting there.
Two Toke says, late in another evening, “I do read your stories, man.”
I give him MY Cheshire grin. “I know you do, Tom. I write em for you. So you won’t forget.”
Tom’s eyes twinkle, they’ve grown so moist, and the light from them is like stars light years away, no telling how long ago, just a sparkle that arrives right now. “You’re a crack—up,” he says in a voice I’ve heard before, a voice not so very far away.
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Past tense, present tense, I love your stories Jack. If you ever write in the future tense, perhaps a tale about a small band of post-apocalyptic survivors, the remnants of all humanity safely tucked away on the southern edge of Camano Island gathering clams, berries, and nettles for their breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the technology allows, write it with the scent of a blazing campfire, preferably burning branches from the forests of Mosinee.
I was always partial to the way your stories instilled the silence of the cool night air with laughter, as we surrounded a crackling fire somewhere deep in the heart of Wisconsin. Keep writing and telling those tales Jack. Please.