Recently, a stranger started to speak to Grace in the arrival’s hall of terminal two, in Dublin airport. She was waiting for a cousin to arrive in from Edinburgh, and a man began a conversation about time.
How funny it was, he said, that when people are waiting for a plane to land, time slowed into infinity. Yet, no doubt the time spent with the people on the plane, would speed up exponentially. The man cited an article he’d read lately, about how it was possible to control the perception of time. All you had to do, he claimed, to slow down the perception of time, was to find something novel and fulfilling in each and every day.
“Like this conversation?” asked Grace, and the man laughed loudly and said, “yes, exactly so”.
They talked about technology and how detailed the airport information was compared with years earlier. Nowadays, the large overhead boards told those waiting when the plane was approaching the airport, the moment of landing, when it was taxing to the gate, and when exactly the passengers had officially landed. The man and Grace didn’t know, however, what to do with this extra information, or the moments of time gained.
Were they to split the second?
Grace was meeting a cousin she hadn’t seen since childhood and was both excited and nervous about the weekend. When she was a child, Grace spent time visiting her cousins on a farm near Ross-on-Wye. Her three older cousins seemed to Grace to have an idyllic existence with their dogs, chickens, sheep, and ponies. The cousins always smelled of earth and came in enormous, warm, cosy clothes that were so well lived in. Grace was meeting the eldest of the three sisters, at the airport.
One time they all went to Tintern Abbey to see the ruins and they took a picnic, a flask of hot tea and a blanket to sit on. The cousins, used to wide open spaces and running, grew tired and restless and started a game of hide and seek.
Grace ran as fast as she could and hid between the gravestones, far away from everyone. She huddled down beside the grave of a man who had died in 1732.
He died when he was 34 and was missed by a loving wife and eight children. Grace wondered if this man liked music if he played the piano or sang? This fellow, this dead fellow, did he play hide and seek with the children, or was he too serious for games?
Did he laugh and look at rainbows with such awe it made it want to cry? Did he dance every chance he got and marvel at the extraordinary brightness of colour? Did he lose sleep with worry about his eight children, his wife, the harvest, and the rain? And did he, at times, realise fully that the best way through his short life, was to be a peaceful warrior; to defend himself fully, while not ever causing harm to any other creatures? Did he wonder about the particles of atoms into the otherness of eternity.
Did his children make him laugh; and did he ever save some time?
Shorter than me 