Eternity over a turkey burger
At the Bel-Aire Diner, known to me as the place of big food. Big things. It seems I end up here most often when something fairly significant is about to happen or is happening. This is partly because the diner is located next to my bank, and the bank happens to be the scene of some significant financial and estate-related events. But other non-financial events have coincided with sitting in these booths. Most memorably I talked to my mother on the phone while she was having one of we-don’t-know-how-many strokes. We didn’t know that at the time but the blanks of the story were soon filled in.
Stories not fully written or understood until days or weeks later make me question eternity, and it makes me question the present. What is the present? Is it an eternal comet burning through time, incinerating the present on its path to the future? Does the present even exist if our ability to comprehend it is conspicuously and totally in the past?
I think that for human beings the present is a cloud: a cloud of memory and anticipation, a mental mixture of known facts and foregone conclusions concering the future. Nothing, then, is unexpected.
