Time for everything under the sun.

My grandfather's pocket watch, still stuck in time.

Among my possessions is my grandfather's gold pocket watch. It is permanently stuck at three-fifty in the afternoon. I do not know the year it stopped working. It may have stopped the day my grandfather had a heart attack, in the winter of 1969. He had just trudged through two feet of snow to get the mail from the mailbox at the top of his long, steep driveway. When he came in the door he was holding his chest. He did not say a word to my grandmother, who was slicing her trademarked burnt crust bread. She said she knew he was dead before he hit the kitchen floor. She finished slicing bread before she phoned anyone. She was a rather cold and logical person. The bread needed sliced; grandfather's ticker had stopped, and there was nothing to be done but finish slicing the bread. So she sliced.

I had a similar experience when my ex-wife had a minor heart attack, as a result of her taking synthetic estrogen. She collapsed on the kitchen floor. I was not slicing bread at the time. I phoned 911. We should have sued the company, but a visit from six handsome paramedics was sufficient for my ex-wife's recovery. It was a reminder of the transitory nature of life. Each day is a work of art, unique, and transient. Each day passes by and it is never the same as the day before, or the day after it, or any day in our lifetimes. This day will be gone forever, from our point of view, and it will never pass this way again. Time waits for no one, and it won’t wait for (us). But don't we all wish this were not true? Don't we all wish for the film version of Groundhog Day, where we learn a lifetime of lessons, and knowledge, in the repetition of one day?

Time has been on the minds of human beings from the beginning. We marvel at those ancient peoples who built megalithic structures to measure, honor, and order it. We have created deities to oversee it. Long ago our forebears made stone calendars that predicted the future. We want to go Back to the Future. We have an insatiable appetite for knowing what was and what will be. Aficionados of the zodiac, and many other mystical practices and beliefs, are evidence of our insecurity with not knowing. Reincarnation is the hope that we will get more time to get life right.  But time, like sand through the hourglass, keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future.

Human beings do ridiculous things with the time we have been given. We waste time all the time, forgetting or ignoring that we do not get one second of it back. Some people are good time managers, and use their time well, to help people. But others, like comedians, lampoon it. Writers write novels and screenplays with time as the centerpiece. Beverly Hills surgeons derive good livings from their clients insatiable needs to look young forever. Millions attempt to thwart the effects of time on their bodies by the use of cosmetics, diets, and exercise routines. It didn’t work for Ponce de Leon; there is no Fountain of Youth. Why   is going the speed of light so worthy of a goal? The faster you go, the more you slow down time. Look up at the stars; many of them are no longer there. You are looking back millions of years in time. The only thing left of them might be the light they emitted long ago.

Time marches on, and marches to a different drummer. Philosophers analyzed it, mathematicians and physicists tried to quantify it. But the wisest of the wise still die. Escapists, who know life is finite, and being unhappy with their lives often turn to drugs, alcohol, and careers to numb life until it passes by like the evening train. To some, putting off thinking about what comes after this life, when our time runs out, is too scary. Will life end or will something new begin when we die? Will there be more time awaiting us on the other side? Spiritual teachers have made comfortable livings promising a blissful eternity, figuring no one will ever come back to prove them wrong. Those who have near death experiences tell tales of traveling in tunnels with a white light at the other end, and arriving in a place where there is love, and time enough for doing whatever we ever dreamt of doing.

One of the things I do with my time is speak to the Creator of the Universe. Some would call it praying. Lily Tomlin, the now ancient comedienne from yesteryears, once was quoted as saying, "When we talk to God, we're praying, but when God talks to us - we're schizophrenic." So true. When I do it I try to be sincere. Sometimes I rant a bit. I rarely joke around with God. It is enough that humanity is a joke. I do my God-talking in private: while walking with bags of groceries, while eating breakfast, as I bend to tie my shoe, while strumming my guitar, showering, writing, and driving. From the point of view of God, Earth emits a continual cacophony of prayers, like a sound of the air escaping from a balloon into the emptiness of space. I suspect atheists secretly pray. But why do we pray? To whom should we pray? We pray to fill up the void, because God often seems absent from our lives. Pascal once said we all have a vacuum inside ourselves that can only be filled with God. I suppose this also applies to vacuum cleaner salesmen. But God seems to be on a sabbatical when Africa is rotting away. Where does God go on vacation? Naples, Florida? We are stuck in time; while the Creator waltzes around the universe and beyond, with nothing but time and dark matter on its hands. And rather large flip-flops on its feet.

Being unstuck in time is a daily experience for me. I expect to see God on one of my mental  journeys. It will be hard to recognize God because God is a chameleon. God and his or her or its little helpers, (aka: angels), can take the form of anything and anyone. God is a shape shifter. God is permanently unstuck outside time. There, in the space where there is no space, the Creator watches and keeps the hands of time ticking right along. Life here is an illusion of light, color, sight, and sound. It is fraught without purpose or meaning, and beneath it all there is the ubiquitous ticking of Father Time's clock.

We are lonely beings without a Creator to remind us of what life is about and what we should be doing with it. I have decided that whenever God presents an opportunity to help someone, I will. I will drop everything and help; that is my calling. Some people would call this unusual, or heroic, or even stupid. Random acts of kindness do not fill our bank accounts. Yet they are what I called my “little opportunities” from God. The English would call me a 'loony.' My job, from my overly optimistic viewpoint, is to smile when God presents a situation where someone needs help. From my POV, it is as if God has custom designed this situation for me, as if God were saying, "Look here, what will you do with this?" Another one happened on a bus yesterday. God took the form of a homeless sixty-year-old Native American woman. She did not have the money to ride the bus, and the driver was telling her she had to take her two big backpacks and get off the bus. So I got up and paid her fare. She sat next to me and asked if I was the one who had paid her fare. I said I was. She handed me back one of the bus tokens I'd given her, but I should have refused it. She would be riding again, maybe not in the form of a Native American. The woman smiled at me and it was as if God were smiling at me behind her lined and weary face. A face that said, "I am tired of this; I do not want to go on with this charade." God had asked me: "Will you or won’t you participate? Will you make time for this act of kindness? Will you say yes when most refuse?" I did accept the opportunity, and it felt good. It felt like time stood still and the universe watched for a moment to see the outcome. God stopped and watched. Because one day I will come permanently unstuck in time. And so will you, and the only things that will matter will be what we have done for our fellow human beings, and for the other creatures with whom we share our little blue ball.

Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks), in the film version of Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse Five, is becoming unstuck in time. Pilgrim is a gentle soul; naïve, kind, thoughtful, seemingly the polar opposite to Kurt Vonnegut, the novel's author. Everything in Pilgrim’s life has a sense of irony: he becomes a prisoner of war during World War II, and he and a large number of American soldiers are put on a train and transported to a former slaughterhouse in the city of Dresden, where they are made to manufacture a nutritional malt syrup. Pilgrim's German captors lampoon him and make him wear a woman's coat. Pilgrim does not object to anything that is going sideways in his life. This was when Pilgrim first begins randomly  jumping back and forth in time. He has no control over what part of his life he will experience. 

Billy and a small group of fellow prisoners survive the allies' firebombing of Dresden in an air-tight bunker. The war ends soon thereafter, and Russians overrun the city. Pilgrim goes home to America and continues his studies in optometry at the Illium School of Optometry, in Illium, New York. He marries Valencia Merble, the obese but attractive daughter of the school's founder, Valencia Merble. He uses a diamond he found, in the lining of the woman's coat the German's gave him, for Valencia's wedding ring. For a number of years afterwards, Pilgrim lives a life of quietude and financial success. As he grows older he becomes more unstuck in time. His time tripping attracts an alien race from the planet, Tralfalmador. The Tralfamadorians, who live in the fourth dimension,  have made a glass geodesic dome zoo for Pilgrim to live in with a former porn star named Montana Wildhack.  After Pilgrim survives an airplane crash, that takes the life of his father-in-law, his wife dies of carbon monoxide poisoning while driving pell-mell to the hospital. 

Pilgrim and his dog, Spot, go with the Tralfamadorians to live on Tralfalmador with Montana Wildhack, (Valerie Perrine). Billy and Montana fall in love and have a child, to the delight of the Tralfalmadorians. It is a strange reenactment of the Garden of Eden, where time no longer mattered.

Vonnegut sought to remind us of that irrefutable fact. Because, if you believe there is a God, then you also accept that God must live outside time, which means God is thinking of us and everything else all at once. There is no past, present, or future. God sees like a Tralfalmadorian. Human beings, seen from this viewpoint have an accordion shape. No one actually dies except at one point in their lives. Time is no longer our master.

While we are trapped in the present, we have the capacity to remember the past, and make plans for the future. The future is still unknown, except to our future selves. Thus, there is a point in the future where we know exactly what happened to us. And that future me remembers what I did, and what I might have done, just as the future you knows all about you. Since this is the case, shouldn’t we be praying to ourselves from time to time? Who could advise us better than ourselves? God, yes, certainly, if you believe in God. But even if you do believe in God, the sad fact is, God does not send emails or speak to us like in olden times. Mostly. I personally do believe in God. I have actually heard God speak to me, though I cannot prove that. It was either God or the Tralfamadorians. It was not an audible voice I recorded. It was a voice in my head. I am not schizophrenic. The experience affirmed to me that God does exist. I do not have a history of schizophrenia. I don’t think it had anything to do with my having more spiritual worthiness. It was random as snow in June. It was a Billy Pilgrim experience.

This is how it happened. I was stuck in traffic near the Beltline overpass in Eugene, Oregon, in April of 2005. There were at least fifty cars lined up, and most likely all of the people in the cars near me were looking straight ahead. For whatever reason, I saw movement to my left and turned in time to see three young people, two women and a man, crossing a Beltline Highway entrance ramp. I turned in time to see a heavyset woman step off a curb and a wallet fall from her back pocket onto the road. At that moment the light changed and the cars moved forward. I was unable to get out of my lane for a quarter of a mile, and by the time I turned around the threesome were gone. I drove to the freeway entrance and stopped to pick up the wallet. Because I was committed to entering the freeway, I then had to drive four miles round trip before I could return to where I’d been. I drove for another mile in the same direction I’d been going in, and since I didn’t see the threesome, I pulled into a mall to take a look at the wallet. The wallet belonged to a twenty-one year old woman named Melissa. It contained a five-dollar bill, a student I.D., driver’s license, social security card, and two credit cards. Losing the wallet would make Melissa’s life rather complicated.

So I said, aloud, to God, “God, you know where Melissa is. Will you help me find her?” Instantly, I heard a voice in my head say, ‘She’s in there.’ And ‘there’ was the store I was looking at, which was a Fred Meyer. I laughed, because I had never heard a voice before, and I realized it had to be God who was speaking to me. I said, “Okay, but it is a big store. She could be anywhere. You will have to give me a sign about where she is or I might not find her.” I heard no voice, but I had the feeling that this stipulation had been heard, so I got out of my car and I walked into Fred Meyer.

This store was laid out with the Electronics and Jewelry areas on the left, and the Ladies Clothing area on the right, for about a hundred-fifty feet, before the entrance hall opened into the very large open area that contained a number of departments. At the place where the two areas met was a row of twenty check-stands and a customer service area.

When I came to the end of the entrance hall, as soon as I caught sight of the registers, I saw Melissa. She had just dropped a bottle of beer and was staring at the puddle of beer and glass around her feet. I smiled. There could not have been a more perfect sign to find Melissa. I walked up to her, held out the wallet, and said, “Melissa, you dropped your wallet back at the Beltline Overpass.” Melissa straightened up, her eyes agog, and took the wallet. “How did you do that?” she asked.

“Heaven Knows,” I replied, and then I turned and walked away. It was a rather cryptic reply, but I didn’t feel like explaining how I had found her. Later, it occurred to me that this small thing could be a very big thing to Melissa. It might have even changed her life. Why I was chosen to be the tool of the Almighty I do not know. But I was.

In the future I will know the importance of that act. I will know the impact of my good deeds and my bad deeds. I hope the good outweighs the bad, if that is how it works, to get into Heaven, assuming Heaven does exist. Most people do not think what we do matters. We are here for a heartbeat and then we are gone. I don’t think that is true. For us it is true, but to God we have always been here, and we will always be here, and we are being born, dying, and living our lives forever and ever. All at the same time.

When God looks at us, and everything else in this universe and every other universe, it is always in the present. But we will always be stuck in time while we are here. Later on, we may not be. Physicists theorize that there are other versions of ourself in other dimensions. I hope this is not true. I don't want to know that my life is the bad version of myself. I always want to think of my life as having potential for improvements on all levels. In the future we may be able to move through time, and visit ourselves, or prevent our births, which is a contradiction of course. There may even be no more need for time, or the sensation of the passage of time. Time will no longer exist. We will be nothing more than particles of light. Photons with awareness.

I don’t think it is too far-fetched to imagine that we may even be in the same room with ourselves; hearing our own prayers; petitioning God on our own behalf. It is a strange thought, but it is a rational, logical deduction. However crazy the world is, underlying it is an enormous but simple mathematical equation. Should we pray to our future selves? They know more than we do. Maybe they can help us navigate time with good decisions.

Last night I dreamt about my father. My father and mother became unstuck in time in 2006. I have been dreaming of he and my mother since they died. I wonder sometimes if they are trying to speak to me, and if they are, what they are saying. My son needs to understand this mystical truth. In thirty years he will be fifty years old. He may be holding his great grandfather's gold pocket watch in his hand when I die. I will be looking down on him and my daughter, trying to advise them through the veil that lies between us. I hope they think about me too, while there is time.