Sniffing Time

Time isn't always on our side. Sometimes it's on our knuckles, or running down our chins like the brown tobacco juice the sisters spat across the room when we were small. Having reached the age of enlightenment, the concept of time as a roving entity becomes easier to swallow, and in fact mixes nicely with the snifter of vapid hyperbole we've come to rely on as a tonic, now that Pappy's gaze is clear again.

On the face of it, time's predilection for attaching itself to the undercarriages of automobiles and perambulators seems ample justification for the additional expense of undercoating, but no such protection existed during the Prenuptial Era. In that day, invention was the mother of necessity, and all the time in the world couldn't have prevented my father from carrying your mother over the threshold and into the garage, where the timing belts were kept. There, the Hemi's lullaby soothed the salvaged beast, while unwatched tachometers turned quarts to picoliters, and thence to billowing clouds of smoke as metal met metal insufficiently lubricated by the oil pump left on the workbench when the lunch bell rang.

By and by, the worms of time learned to leverage boredom, leaving their holes strewn roundabout and yon, over and then under every corner of the small blue marble you call home. Not that phoning home is the panacea it once was, before technology riddled the landscape with high-frequency shadows too dark to permit even the single bar required for rudimentary conversation over a beer. Bar none, the knuckled sandwich extract we enjoy at day's end has congealed, leaving us exposed to the screeching and cawing of birds on the wing, in the tunnels, and under the wheels of progress that roll between the here and now and the now and then, wherever fine timepieces are sold.