September 27: Time Window, Worry About Tomorrow, Shades Drawn

People drifted away now, seeing the color return to Billy's cheeks, seeing him smile.  Valencia stayed with him, and Kilgore Trout, who had been on the fringe of the crowd, came closer, interested, shrewd.

"You looked as though you'd seen a ghost," said Valencia.

"No," said Billy.  He hadn't seen anything but what was really before him--the faces of the four singers, those four ordinary men, cow-eyed and mindless and anguished as they went from sweetness to sourness to sweetness again.

"Can I make a guess?" said Kilgore Trout.  "You saw through a time window."

"A what?" said Valencia.

"He suddenly saw the past or the future.  Am I right?"

"No," said Billy Pilgrim.  He got up, put a hand into his picket, found the box containing the ring in there.  He took out the box, gave it absently to Valencia.  He had meant to give it to her at the end of the song, while everybody was watching.  Only Kilgore Trout was there to see. 

"For me?" said Valencia.

"Yes."

"Oh, my God," she said.  Then she said it louder, so other people heard.  They gathered around, and she opened it, and she almost screamed when she saw the sapphire with a star in it.  "Oh, my God," she said.  She gave Billy a big kiss.  She said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

Time window.  I'm sitting in my office at the university right now, and I would give my left testicle for a window of any kind right now.  I'm staring at four, cream-colored walls.  There's not a whole lot of distraction, and I sort of like it that way.  It makes it easier to concentrate on blog posts or reading or grading.

I have plenty of time windows in this office, though.  It doesn't take much to get me to stare into some pane of the past.  For instance, just a moment ago, I was thinking about the day after the birth of my son.  I taught a class of freshman composition, and I showed pictures of my newborn.  The teenage girls "awwed" and "oooohed."  The teenage guys kind of rolled their eyes, and I think one of them asked, "Does this mean you're going to push back the due date of the paper?"

My window into the future is kind of limited at the moment.  All I see is myself, in about five hours, leaving campus, exhausted and hungry.  I also see myself freezing my ass off at a football game this Friday night.  Aside from that, I got nothing.  Future windows are always foggier than past windows.

Some people would probably say that gazing through times windows is a waste of time.  It either makes you sad and nostalgic, or fearful and anxious.  In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says, "So don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries.  Today's trouble is enough for today."  Translation:  no time windows for you.  It's good advice, from a pretty good source.

So, I'm going to try to keep my shades drawn on time windows for the rest of the afternoon and evening.  I'm just going to focus on the next moment, which involves a chicken sandwich and paper grading.

Or maybe Saint Marty should plan out his life for the next five years, instead.