The woman across the street is dying. Kidney cancer, her daughter said. It’s very aggressive, she said. Several vehicles sit in the driveway and along the curb in front of her house. The garage door, which she nearly always kept closed during the past couple of years except when she was on her John Deere mower cutting the grass, now stands open much of the day. People come and go through the garage rather than by the front door. Many of them, neighbors and friends who had heard, carry a pan or lidded container, likely filled with homemade food. Others, her relatives, have been there for several days.
***
Last weekend a small nun in a black-and-white habit stood along the sidewalk in Allison Park in Sleepy Eye, the town where I was born, and held the handle of a baby carrier, a tiny child wrapped in a white blanket asleep inside. Down the hill to her right and less than a block away, runners of all sizes and shapes milled about in the street and behind the starting line for the 5K race. To her left was the crest of the small hill and then an asphalt path that bent around the lake, gray under a warm dense fog into which the path and then the runners vanished.
***
I’ve had a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time for over twenty years, and now that I’m retired, I’ve finally gotten around to reading it. Fortunately, theoretical physics tends not to change much in two decades, so that most—if not all—of what Hawking writes is still accepted or at least not disproven. For example: “If everything in the universe depends on everything else in a fundamental way, it might be impossible to get close to a full solution by investigating parts of the problem in isolation.” So it appears, even in the small seemingly disparate details of these late summer days.
***
In the backyard, two hummingbirds have been sampling the pink and light purple blossoms of hostas, decorative plants with large leaves and trumpet-shaped flowers. They sometimes wheel around the corner of the garage, their wings humming like those of an ominously large insect, and then brake near the edge of the patio. There they hang in midair, nearly motionless, as if able to stop time in order to consider the moment, the colors, the still shadow of the honeysuckle, before slipping a long, thin beak into a blossom. As Stephen Hawking implies and William Carlos Williams declares about a wheelbarrow and white chickens, it’s a drink on which “so much depends.”
***
How we see the sun—whether rising out of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, or blazing down from directly overhead, or balancing on the peak of the neighbor’s house—is always relative. Simply put, from our perspective, the sun is never where it appears. This is because it takes sunlight more than eight minutes to reach the earth even though light travels at the astounding speed of 186,000 miles per second. So, when we see the sun peek over the horizon, we see it where it was eight minutes earlier. When distances are this great, we don’t see things as they are; we see them as they were. In effect, we gaze into the past.
***
These days, as I run mile after mile on the gravel township roads south of town—my gray shirt darkening with sweat, stones crunching under my Nikes—I find that summer goes faster than I do. Which, of course, at my age doesn’t take much. But racing against time isn’t always the objective. Instead, I sometimes wonder what I’d do, what I’d look at and listen for, how I’d spend my time if I were on the other side of the street. Would I care that the goldenrod is blooming now that it’s late August? Would I watch the dozens of purple martins careening and swooping after insects rising out of the fresh cut grass of the large empty lot down the street? Would I want my days filled with the coming and going of people? Would I finish reading Hawking’s book? Or would I run, racing through time and light as the days grow shorter and fewer?
***
Imagine a resident of 19 Draconis, a star system in the constellation Draco, who has a sufficiently powerful telescope and looks in on us. Because it takes nearly fifty years for light to travel between Draconis and Earth, he/she/it/they would see us not as we are but as we were in about December 1972. They would see me as a fifteen-year-old with short hair, a bony physique, and a silver cap on one front tooth. But they would also see more than twenty tons of U.S. bombs raining down on North Vietnam; Roberto Clemente’s plane crashing into the Atlantic; Apollo 17 firing its engines, rising off the launch pad at Cape Kennedy, and racing toward the moon; and Pittsburgh Steelers running back Franco Harris making “The Immaculate Reception.” Those on Draconis would perceive our past as the present. And because for us the next fifty years have already occurred and cannot be changed, it means that for those distant observers our future has already happened and is, therefore, fixed, predetermined, unchangeable. Of course, to us, the future, at least our future, is not fixed. Which means that, depending on where and when we are, time is relative.
***
This, too, makes me wonder about the people gathered across the street and why we call those from whom we descend and who are descended from us “relatives.” Of course, it’s partly because they’re related to us and are, therefore, our relation. But maybe, too, because we can relate to them and they to us since we share certain cultural and religious experiences, endure similar geographic and environmental influences, and have common physical, emotional, and psychological traits. Or maybe it’s simply because the way we see or experience ourselves and our relations—just as we experience time—is also relative.
***
Time, like light, according to Hawking and others, is distorted by gravity. The closer a clock is to a large dense object with a strong gravitational pull, the slower the clock runs compared to one farther away. Similarly, if light from a distant star, such as 19 Draconis, passes by our sun before reaching earth, the light is deflected or bent by the sun’s gravity so that the star’s apparent position as we see it differs from its actual position. And not only does light bend around large, dense objects, it behaves, strangely enough, as if made sometimes of waves and at other times particles emitted and absorbed in packets called quanta. This sort of dual existence causes light and other extremely small particles like electrons to behave in ways that seem impossible in the larger, everyday world we’re used to. This is the conflict between Einstein’s general relativity, which focuses on the very large, and quantum mechanics, which describes the extremely small. According to quantum mechanics, light, due to this duality, behaves like one person —one of the neighbor’s relatives, say—walking to the front of the house across the street and going inside through both the front door and the door inside the garage simultaneously.
***
The days are already noticeably shorter, here in late August. The trees grow still as the sun sets, the birds quiet, and aside from an occasional diesel pickup accelerating south out of town, its turbocharger whistling, the most prevalent sound is the rhythmic drone of crickets. By 8:00 the sun has already descended behind the trees across the street. It leaves a warm glow on the peak of the roof of the neighbor’s house, where the people inside may be measuring her life in weeks or days. Or maybe, I hope, in sunsets. Fleeting but wondrously extravagant sunsets—auburn and yellow and red smearing the western sky, the sun still warm and radiant even though it’s already gone.
Wow! This is so well done. Thanks.
Thanks, Dan. Glad you like it.