#40 PUPPY -- TIME

# 40 PUPPY -- 

It’s a bit of a struggle Scooter and I are sharing. 

Training’s been a bit off. Even affection is affected.

I’ve been distracted. Busy, helping with, and officiating a marriage. Then, oh right, preparing for tonight’s arrival of an out-of-town guest, and just yesterday, caught off guard by, involved in, heavily concerned about cancer discovered in a friend’s brain. Much of my Time has turned from puppy to people. Scooter and I are mildly suffering the shift.

“Give me that!” I find myself saying to Scooter concerning Time.

“Wait! That Time you are demanding belongs to me!” The pup remembers.

“Just a minute,” say I when according to Scooter, Time for play rolls around; when while standing at the kitchen counter I beg off, but Scooter pushes plastic Purple Ball against the backs of my knees, insisting on my attention. 

“Time to play. What’s with this woman?” he wonders.

He tolerates but doesn’t particularly like the grooming table set up where I work to tame his heavy coat. He does appreciate it. No snarls, no knots under his elbows, no tangles between toes. He’s a happy dog, groomed. It’s time now, I know, to groom him, but I’ve put it off some.

I’ve been busy. I’ve put off consistent training. Scooter shows me. He puts off the Sock challenge he created some several months ago, a magical game designed for joy among the players. I shorten our walk time. Scooter shortens his attention span.

“Look,” I say, asking for the eye to eye focus we share.

“No,” says he, “I think I won’t.”

“Come,” I say.

“Sure, but slowly,” says he.

Wait. What’s happening here? What is it we are struggling with, against, over, and about? The answer is “Time.

What is it exactly?

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says that while we don’t know just what it is, we know what it does to us. Time “locks us into the present, forever transitioning us from the past to our unknown future.”

How odd is it, that we can move more than one direction in any other coordinate: up/down, left/right, forward/back. But, time? While we still don’t know what Time is, we do know that it is both cyclical and linear. Cyclical, we get. We know the timing of many movements: the sun, stars, tide, currents, day, years, and when our teenager is expected home. We accept linear time — everything moving forward, including us. However, no matter how hard we reach back, we can’t inhabit the past. No matter how hard we try, we can’t predict (I don’t care what your psychic says) what will be. Not Even In-The-Next-Second. Stuck we are with the one thing time gives us: Now. The present. That’s it. 

I have more appreciation now for thinkers of old (I do mean a very long time ago) like Venerable Bede (d.735AD) who asked, “If” (as he believed) “the world began on 19 March, time per se could not have begun until 23 March, when God created the Sun.” He was troubled by what was before Time. 

When it was common for medieval theologians to ask how many angels fit on the head of a pin, concerning the universe, they also asked, “When God created, did he create in time, or did he have to create the matrix of space and time before he created matter?” I don’t know if they discussed the chicken and egg problem.

Time. We live in it. We talk about it. We use it. We long for it. We grieve it. We 

 . . . you can fill in the rest. 

I have a pup who needs me to return to some familiar time cycles: time to play, time to be outside, time for grooming, cuddling, roughhousing, learning, time to find mom’s sock and exchange it for a treat. 

I have a friend stuck in a Now that is terrifyingly present, neither allowing her to move back to before, or forward where she might see what will be.

I may not know what Time is, but my clock chimes, shadows move across the carpet, a puppy bows in play, my friend works to regain walking, and I am reminded that I live confined in a mystery called “Now.”