When we are captured by time, it is usually a moment of deep distress, as in those brief seconds of a car accident that stretch out into an unending set of film frames, one individual movement captured after another. It's as if the world almost begins to move backward, lagging and sluggish. Like you are literally living in slow motion. Only, when it's over, we say it all happened lightning fast.
Musicians call this experience stolen time, and in a strange way, it allows the players of instruments to make time flexible. Classical musicians call this tempo rubato. Rock artists call it groove. Jazz virtuosos refer to it as swing. This Buddhist suggests that it might be an engineering of the Bardo, the in-between state of consciousness. Even if you don't play an instrument or have years of meditation practice under your belt, you not only experience flexibility of time, you hover within its bounds way more than you imagine.
There's the time it takes for the sun to set in autumnal months as the geese fly overhead in their mathematically-perfect "V" pattern. Or the time it takes for dawn to arrive while insomnia battles your alarm clock. When you are in high school and stay out all night with your friends. The moment you pick up your newborn and feel all those impossibly tiny fingers curl around a single digit of your own. The first night you hold your soulmate and stare into those sumptuous eyes, unable to pull away, even for an instant.
Time is an experience.
It is as variable and everchanging as a spring wind. We can manipulate it without even being conscious of the process. We look at it a thousand times a day - on our clocks, watches, laptops, iPhones - but it moves beyond measurement. Much more than the second hand or stopwatch ticking. We experience time. It marks us, ages us, keeps us stuck and unmoving, propels us forward even when we don’t want to, and manipulates our emotion. It is energy, like all things we create, and the fluidity of its markings define us as memory, desire, regret.
I never thought much about time until my little brother died.
He was a month shy of his 38th birthday when his heart exploded. His wife called with the news; she was at the hospital. My brother was on an operating table, his chest splayed wide, and a roomful of medical personnel was fighting to save his life. What I remember most is looking at my watch and calculating how long it would take to get dressed (it was late in the evening and I was about to retire). As I was changing from my pajamas to jeans and a t-shirt, trying to recall the last place I kicked off my sneakers, I wondered which gas station might be open. I lived in a very small town in the southwest corner of Virginia and most places closed their doors by 10:00 p.m.
I cursed myself, realizing that I had broken my grandfather's rule. When I was a teenage driver, he checked the gas gauge on my car every night, right as the sunset started to paint the horizon. If it revealed a quarter tank or less, he made me drive into town (a half hour each way) and fill up. "You never know what might happen in the night. What will you do if you cannot get somewhere you need to be in an emergency?"
As an adult, I seldom forgot that wisdom. But that particular day was an exceptionally long one for me as a teacher, and I told myself I would get up early the next morning and stop for fuel and coffee. My mother lived almost an hour away. Her home was way out in the country, far beyond the state line into Tennessee, and I would need at least a half a tank of gas to get there. When I got in the car, I noted that it had taken twenty minutes to get ready to leave. Lori said she did not know how long it would take for my brother to come out of surgery. On the drive to my mother's house, I stopped at three different gas stations. At every stop, either my debit card would not work in the pump or the machine itself was out of order. Three quarters of the way into my trip, the gas light flashed on the dashboard.
All I could think about was time.
I knew that I must relay the news to my mother in person. Would I get there before another call came through? Would I be able to make it the rest of the way to her house with only 1/8th of a tank? How many minutes had I wasted by stopping three different places? How much gas had been consumed by starting the engine unnecessarily? And how many seconds had melded into minutes and minutes run together in chunks ... quarter past ... half past ... quarter till ... on the hour?
The last dozen miles were clocked under the same prayer, "Let me get there, please!"
When I pulled into my mother's driveway, I had been riding on fumes for over fifteen minutes. The lights were off in her kitchen, which signaled she had called it a night. When her fingers pulled back the curtain enough to see that it was me, I knew her heart sank. There was no other reason for me to show up unannounced at that hour unless something was terribly wrong.
I remember leading her to the dining room and then looking up at the clock that was always ticking loudly over the table. Not many minutes had passed - after telling my mother that her only son, her youngest child, was in grave trouble - when my cell phone lit up. It was Lori's number pulsing on the screen. I answered it, expecting to hear her voice. When I heard a male ask "Jan?" I looked up at the clock.
It was Lori's brother, James, a man I had only met once, on the day my brother married the love of his life. I said, "What's wrong?" His voice broke and I heard a small child-like sound come through the earpiece. "Dwayne's gone. We lost him. He didn't make it."
That's when time was stolen from me.
I held the hands of the clock in front of my eyes and it was as if a thin, filmy cloud covered them, stopped everything from advancing. Yet, to this day, I could not tell you what hour it displayed.
"What? What did you say?"
I listened to the same news, and not knowing what to do next, I heard myself ask, "Where's Lori? Where's Holden?" I don't remember his answer. I don't know why I wanted to know where my sister-in-law and eight-year-old nephew was at that moment or why that mattered to me. I do not recall the way the conversation ended.
What sticks out is that turning around, facing my mother and Tom, her long partner of 30 years, seemed an eternity, as if those clock hands had jumped from behind the glass and wrapped around my ankles, tightening and tightening, until it hurt to move towards her. In fact, all I could do was make a pivotal half-turn and blurt out, "He's gone Mama." Then, I watched as my mother fell into Tom's arms, watched as he caught her before gravity won and brought her to the floor, watched as she wailed and wailed and wailed.
That's what I tell myself happened. But, in truth, time cut it all in half.
Simultaneously, as I watched my mother's descent into grief, I am told that I turned and sat down on a dining room chair. My friend, that had come with me to deliver the news and wait by my side, told me later that she had never heard me make such a sound in all the dozen years she had known me. And that she never wanted to ever hear it again. Not once for the rest of her life. I imagine now that it is what time would sound like as it's being stolen. My friend said she thought it resembled the whimper of an animal whose leg was caught in a trap. Then, it escalated into a long, sustained, trembling scream - but one that was kept at bay, volume purposely lowered, as if it too was in disbelief.
I don't know how long it lasted, for time changed. It moved past me and fluttered around my heart, stoic and resonant, a stubborn reality out of reach. Oddly, the feeling was a moment where time moved both more quickly and more slowly, unable to decide which one it wanted to be. My friend said this went on for over twenty minutes. When we talked about it much later, that number sounded preposterous to me. It was a fluid part of my memory that kept changing every time I tried to relive it. Objects moved around or were misplaced. Colors were not right. The very air in the room was palpable and yet was violently sucked out while my lungs burned in horror. Nothing was the correct geometrical shape. And I could have sworn that I heard the clock laughing. That maniacal laugh, like Vincent Price, at the end of Thriller.
There is a different measurement of the minute, hour, day, month, and year when an unexpected loss arrives. It seems as if time has been siphoned, just like the air that instantly leaves the room. And it steals everything.
With my little brother's death, I lost my past. I lost my present. I lost my future. All of them gone with him. Time was stolen from me and it didn't sound like a musical notation. It wasn't something that could be listened to or hummed or played. It was silent. Like a vacuum in space where stardust swirls and no one can hear.
In an instant, I also lost my son. Dwayne was born in 1976, two and a half months after my 14th birthday. I was there the day he came home from the hospital. I changed his diapers. I fed him when he was hungry. I rocked him in my arms into sleep. As he grew into a toddler, I bought him toys with my paycheck from an after-school job delivering flowers. I shared music with him in the car, or on a small hand-held transistor radio, and we sang songs together until he knew all the words - even as young as four. When he begged to go with me to the grocery store or the mall in town or to Dairy Queen for an ice cream, the first thing he did when he jumped into my car was ask for music. He either wanted to hear the pigs or that song about Teddy.
The pig request was Pink Floyd's Pigs on the Wing from their Animals album. You could literally hear pigs snorting at the beginning and end of most of those tracks. Dwayne howled with laughter every time he heard them, despite repeating the experience hundreds of times. And Teddy was a tune first recorded sometime in the late 1950s - The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's Mr. Bojangles. Before the song came through the speakers, an old man in Texas told the story of how he taught his dog to sing. He called for the dog, blew into his harmonica, said, "Chord with this now, Teddy. Here, show these folks you can sing." As he kept blowing through that mouthpiece, the dog's howls got louder and louder and louder until the harmonica melded into a voice, singing
I knew a man, Bojangles, and he'd dance for you, in worn out shoes.
Silver hair, a ragged shirt and baggy pants ... the old soft shoe...
We spoke in tears of fifteen years, how his dog and him They traveled about.
His dog up and died. He up and died. After twenty years he still grieves ... please ... Mr. Bojangles ... dance ...
The Sunday that my brother's obituary was printed in a local newspaper, my mother asked me to pick up as many copies as I could find. She wanted to laminate them for family members out of town. I got in my car and hit every little gas station and convenience store in a 20-mile radius. It was no small feat because we lived in the South and churches had already closed their doors from the morning service. Many folks had already scooped up the paper on their way home. I finally managed to build a stack of close to ten copies on the passenger seat. At the last stop, I turned the engine over, and the radio blared because I hardly ever turned it off at a journey's end. The station was set on an obscure jazz show, in sharp contrast to the numerous country music choices. But what came out of the speakers that day was an old man, telling a story about his dog, Teddy.
We experience time.
And every once in a rare while, even when it is stolen, you get lucky.
Something, or someone, manipulates it back to you.
And you meet an old love.
And you dance.
~ Dwayne Allen Thomas ~
April 3, 1976 - March 3, 2014
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