Time is more like it used to be than it was before

The Column: 05.20.22

I have suddenly become very easygoing thanks to the black hole in our galaxy out near the constellation Sagittarius that astronomers have provided pictures of, a mass equivalent to four million suns, temps in the trillions, with a gravitational force that bends time, which has given me a larger perspective and made me less intolerant of those who say “less” when they mean “fewer” or those who misuse “who” and “whom,” of whom I know a few, plus aggressive drivers, over-friendly waiters, misplaced glasses, spam, a great many formerly irritating things are less so thanks to this new information and I’m grateful to whomever and whoever provided it.

It’s an enormous universe we’re floating around in. We thought it was a big deal to put men on the moon, but in the greater scale of things, that’s like going out the front door to the mailbox. We’re adrift in a sea of endless ignorance and to me this says, “Enjoy your insignificance. Be contented with what you have.” I have a cup of black coffee, a laptop computer, a grandfather clock whose pendulum ticks off the time without bending it, and from the next room I hear my wife getting dressed. She is an independent woman, curious, venturing, an observer of humanity, who never depended on me for entertainment though we do enjoy each other’s company. For me, she intensifies time greatly, which is even better than bending.

Here in Minnesota time bends often and we may get snow on Opening Day of baseball season or a heat wave in December and we become a cold rainy Georgia. So we’re accustomed to disappointment. What’s bewildering is success. Our parents didn’t prepare us for that. They taught us to endure. So when, as sometimes happens, there is something to celebrate, we are torn: will our jubilation be seen as prideful? Will it be a trigger for people whose self-esteem is low? So we stifle ourselves.

I am facing this problem with my 80th birthday coming up in a few months. I’m a medical miracle. Had I been born thirty years earlier, I’d have died fifty years ago. I should charter a plane and fly my family and several Mayo doctors to a Pacific island with zero light pollution where we can lie at night and be amazed by the trillion brilliant pinpoints of the Milky Way and maybe see Sagittarius and feel young and giddy, but I won’t, and if people congratulate me, I’ll say, “Well, I’ve been lucky so far but you never know, there’s probably a pizza deliveryman out there fated to intersect with me and I’ll perish in a pile of pepperoni.”

I suppose the black hole out there is a challenge to Christian faith, to believe that the Creator of the black hole with its four million suns (which is thought to be one of the smaller black holes in the universe) also sent His Son to this planet to tell people, “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” assuming that the kingdom includes those four million suns. It is a great deal for the mind to grasp, especially mine, which in recent weeks has been trying to clear my shelves of unread books that I’ll never read, due to vision problems that make small type illegible due to immaculate degeneration.

By my age, however, faith is a settled matter. Unbelief happens in your twenties and you go along enjoying cool incredulity until something happens, the birth of a child, visions of starry sky, perhaps a grasshopper landing in your palm and eating sugar left over from your cookie and then flying away, and you wander into church and fall in with a bunch of believers, and see as through a glass, darkly, but have faith that someday we’ll behold God face to face.

Meanwhile, time is foreshortened. My middle years are a muddle of chronology, but childhood scenes are in clear focus, the thrill of tobogganing down a steep hill and out onto the frozen Mississippi, the girl in seventh grade who challenged me to wrestle and threw me down and kissed me on the lips. I didn’t resist. And then there was the lunch at Dock’s restaurant thirty years ago where I met a woman and we talked for three hours and we’ve been talking ever since. She is funnier than I and if she ever writes a memoir about our marriage, I think you’ll be well entertained. In fact, I’m writing a blurb now. “The only reason I’d come back to Earth would be to read this book.”