The Crone Contemplates Time’s Passage

Occasioned by George’s Visit, Two Bottles of Chablis and Vol. 155 No. 4 of the National Geographic

l.

For starters, there are dinosaurs with peanut brains who, through dumb luck, got stuck in tar where, eons later, their remains were found like scattered beads. Then scientists restrung the bones and put the great primordial molars in glass cases so visitors could say wow and wonder at the way life was In The Beginning.

Now, as for me, what teeth I’ve lost so far were bought by fairies for a dime and I’m quite sure the fairies tossed my teeth into the trash and any sign of them has long since disappeared.

ll.

Then take the farmer, plowing up a field. He hits on something hard. He stoops, his fingers probe, yield up a stone where he can see the outline of a fabled fish, its spine etched for eternity upon the rock. Then crowds flock the museum for a look at what lived in this place way back then when water covered the north forty.

When I was small, in winter I would throw my body on the ground, swing legs and arms, leave cherub wings, celestial garments in the snow. The sun surveyed my mark upon the world, my ice-age frieze, and fallen angels wept themselves to slush.

lll.

Suppose in Africa, deep in the clichéd sands of time, some tracks turn up and Dr. Leaky, on his haunches, hrummphs, “My hunch is we have stumbled on a trail left by a hominid who measured four-foot eight and walked erect three point six million years ago, and from this evidence we know his name was Australopithecus Afarensis.”

Well, in my day I’ve run along the beach, dug heels and toes into the sand and standing there have watched the waves erase each footprint leaving not a trace that I have been.

lV.

Consider, please, my problem with Pompeii. Most peasants in Pompeii lived unassuming lives. Plebeian husbands, humble wives who worked and slept and woke and by a stroke of fate were stopped dead in their tracks by a stupendous belch. Ordinary folk who, by their very act of dying, (oh, I will grant you, it was flashy) left us no denying they had lived.

Unless I’m stuck in cataclysmic glue, to be exhumed some light-years hence by aliens from another sphere, I fear that what Koheleth wrote is true. My bones will vanish like the fragile grass that grows above my grave. Good grief.

V.

My point is made. The race for immortality is run on dead end streets (small pun intended) and if our hieroglyphs befuddle only bats in undiscovered caves, well . . . so it goes. Come pour another glass, dear George. Let’s drink to us and all the other hoboes on the train. We’re coming, Ozymandias!

Yet now, before we turn the bottle upside down, before the cooks go home, please shine the candle full upon my face. Preserve me with your stare where I may bloom each summer in your garden of blue iris.

*

I wrote this piece twenty-five years ago. It originally appeared in the April 27, 2000, edition of ARCHAEOLOGY MAGAZINE under the title: Shall I Compare Thee to a Backfill Pile? I recently dug it out of my files and realized it feels much, much closer to the bone today == in my Crone-dom — than it did back then when I was a mere babe.

Take it easy, friends. Much metta until next time.

Oz