Where the Time Goes

My mother always used to say, “Where does the time go?” So I’m here to announce officially where the time goes. It goes towards fending off the chaos of the universe.

A case in point.

The other day the Bean and I happily set off for the library. We spent a long time sifting through the kids’ book section, accumulating a huge pile to bring home. Finally the library was about to close, so we lugged the great piles of books up to the desk to check them out. But when I put my card into the checker-outter machine, the checker-outter spat it out. Turns out the card had expired. So we went over to the renewal desk, but it turned out I owed $2 in fines. So I got out my wallet to pay the fines, but turned out it was so late that the cash box had been locked away already. So we’d have to wait to the next day to pay the fines, renew the card, and check out the books.

The Bean was disconsolate. We trailed home, bookless.

Notice that the universe has made a left turn into chaos at this point.

So we try to right the chaos. The next day we tromp back to the library. They’ve saved the books for us. They haul them out and put them tantalizingly on the checker-outter. The Bean is fairly shaking with eagerness to get at them. We present ourselves at the card renewal desk. I pay the $2 fine and it goes into the cash box. And then to renew the card, they need to see my driver’s license.

I look through all the cards in my wallet. The driver’s license is not there. I look through them again, slowly, carefully, one by one. It is not there. I remember having to show it to a teller at the bank earlier in the day. Somehow it must have been left at the bank. The bank is closed.

See, this is chaos fighting back.

I briefly consider ripping open the fabric of space-time, tearing a great rent in reality, exposing the person working the controls, and punching that person in the nose.

I can hear the voice of chaos whispering in my ear. It says, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

In the absence of a driver’s license, the library will need a utility bill or something like that. By the time I get back with the utility bill, the library will be closed.

We trail home disconsolately again. I try not to say things like, “You see? This is why the Buddha came up with the idea of the Great Wheel of Suffering, from which we learn the Four Noble Truths, the fifth being ‘Never try to do anything just as the library is closing.’” Because a pontificating pissed-off mother is even worse than a mother who denies you a library copy of Time Cat two days in a row, and things are bad enough already.

So days go by and we get the utility bill and eventually the Bean gets his copy of Time Cat -- and in a drawer at home I find a second library card. The current library card. The non-expired library card. The card I never needed to replace in the first place. As Thurber says in The Thirteen Clocks, somewhere there is the sound of someone laughing.

And the bank denies all knowledge of my driver’s license, and it takes three weeks to get it replaced (and all of yesterday afternoon).

Every time you try to put something straight, the universe puts it akilter again.

So this is not to mention the bicycle with the gear that breaks just as I’m rushing off to school; and when I finally get it fixed, the lock on the garage breaks, so that I can’t get the bicycle out.

And the interlibrary loan book that vanishes into oblivion, and when I finally concede defeat and pay the $120 replacement fee, it turns up way in the back under the sofa. And when I convince the library to refund a fraction of the $120, they lose the next interlibrary loan book, and twe’re still wrangling over that one.

I calculate that 80% of my time is taken up dealing with these irritants, the ways in which the universe keeps trying to revert to chaos, fighting off all our attempts to set it straight. The universe doesn’t want to be set straight. And to this end it has provided an infinite number of things to break and get lost. All I can conclude is that there’s only a brief space between the time you finally get Time Cat home from the library and the time you lose it. The only way to strike back at the forces of chaos is, while you’ve got it, to enjoy the heck out of it.