Time, Tomatoes, The Cosmos

This morning I saw time again. I was crouched in the garden just after sunrise looking at my phone, reading the news and drinking coffee. The news, of course, is desperate, with people eating locust in Madagascar, women in Afghanistan preparing to endure terrible oppression, Covid everywhere, etc. Maybe it was fatigue with it all, but I considered the tomatoes about every 15 seconds, like a computer skipping lanes and trying to hop to a different window. It was right then that I was time again, something that happens more and more often after 50, I suppose. I’m right in between two points. I know a generation in the last chapter of their lives and I know more than a few who’ve barely begun. From right here, it seems that there are flashes, strange lucid blips, where I can see all the way into the energetic fog of beginning and then turn and peer into the edge of starry night, both equidistant. Tomatoes are a metaphor for everything, because everything is a metaphor in the morning if you try. This year they grew big before they ripened, far larger than normal, and I reason it’s because of the weather, the varieties I planted, the soil- essentially a complex set of variables, combining in new ways I never understand in advance. The Second Law of Thermodynamics in a garden setting.

A few years ago I was in a store that sold tattoo supplies. I was chatting pleasantly with the owner, shooting the breeze and talking about Portland tattoo history, not even guying anything, when I noticed a very young woman. She was buying liners (used for, you guessed it, outlines), so I pegged her as a student. Her own tattoos were tragic, a junkyard NASCAR sticker assemblage of line drawings, but then my own tattoos are tragic, too, just a different generation of garbage. I saw time right then because I realized something like this had probably happened to me when I was her age, but it was a catalogue then instead of a store. I reasoned she would likely be okay. Once, some 25 years ago, a young tattoo guy and his tattoo gal, earnest ink slinging hustlers both, hung themselves in broad daylight from the Steel Bridge, jumping at the same time. She’d never hear that story, just like I’d never hear the tale of one of her bush league pals eating too much Adderall or joining a cult and moving to Idaho to raise two-headed chickens.

Maybe that’s why books are important. Some part of time is captured in what is written. An argument can made that music is the same way, that all art is. Not those tattoos, of course. The shelf life is a single lifespan. These tomatoes, they too will come into being and then pass back into nothing, little bunches of matter drawn together by life and then, after a glorious climb toward the sun and a muscular fruiting, poof- a cup of atoms and molecules again, dispersed back into the sphere from whence they came. Yesterday, I read a document entitled A Statistical Estimation of the Occurrence of Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the Milky Way Galaxy. Most of the life in the Milky Way has come and gone, it says. We are outliers, both in time and in our position in space. That has a pleasant ring to it.