TIMELESS

In frazzled jeans, my Stanford friend says, “How's it been?”

Forty elbows, I thought. “I was going through our stone creek stuff.”

The refinery with an antenna. The blue parrot perched on its corkscrew. “This stuff is just junk to straight people.”

“We could tell them.”

“You don't say.”

“Dylan did . . .” pulling a corner of his mouth.

“Yeah, but here's the thing. When you're really into it, right down into the fibers, it's molecules and atoms, right? Quarks. And beyond that, it's elves. They're behind a waterfall. And when you look – whoops! Where'd they go?”

“Statistics.”

And as I had said, this is all so.

“Makes a bloody fine sunset.”

“But there's no blinding light, you know? Eternity just gets flipped on its head, and then there's birth. It just happens. And then a big, loud, 'I am!'”

Kid you not.

“So they thought I was crying, but hey. Everyone's gotta breathe.”

That made a pause, for the time being.

“For being what?”

“You ask. Well, what it's doing doesn't stop. Rust never sleeps. Those forgotten things out there . . .”

“. . . were once upon a time somebody's future.”

Reads my mind. Quarks are the fine print, like when you click on 'I agree,' and these 3-D stoned sculptures get parceled out. It's either magic, or the sorcerer's apprentice.

“Ah, we're defined,” and his eyes levitate over the Goodwill trailer, “by how we relate to others.”

But he doesn't seem to notice the drifting jelly fish, slipping by degrees, spinning entanglements.

“The stage fills up, doesn't it? See? there's Shakespeare doing his playwright act on the floor of the Globe.”

So get in the boat, strap your boots on. There'll be tariffs to pay. And look – there's that file photo of the New York Stock Exchange. Blink. You're vaccinated. That plague of ads, the inconvenient rains, flooding, heat, tornadoes? You're gonna like the way your swamp dog does the news, how North Korea looks in the new normal.

With an 8x10 view camera on a tripod, set up on a deck over the top of his car, Ansel Adams pulls off the cap for a time exposure. Half Dome, an American icon.

Next slide, please.

The sky is parrot-blue. Immunized eyes will see rusted bits as line dancers in the march of time. But floating free in a mist of pixels are dreams caught in a slab of concrete just beside my chair: LARRY, 1962. It's a two-way mirror.

Next.

When hiking through the redwood forest, and passing by the Cave of the Winds, I felt a breeze from nowhere. It was now.