IT'S ABOUT TIME

Downtown, in Little Tokyo, there are metal bands embedded in the sidewalk which tell you what businesses used to occupy the various storefronts and restaurants. I'm always moved by this keeping track of the past and commemorating those who have gone before. I wish we did this all over the city. While I know some Los Angeles history nuts who can tell you what stood at the corner of Third and Fairfax forty years ago, brass bands in the sidewalk would be a lot more available. 
     I thought of this because I saw a photo of 72nd Street and Broadway in New York as it is now. I lived in that neighborhood but haven't been there in years and I was surprised to see a new-ish tall apartment building on the corner. It gave me pause  -- where had the Embassy movie theatre gone, the place where I had first seen Jules and Jim? And the other relatively low buildings that once made up that corner? An old story, of course - the city built and rebuilt again and again.  
     That started me thinking about time, about my wanting to hold on to my particular time and the memories it's given me. But what difference does it make that the corner of 72nd and Broadway no longer looks the way it did when I was last there, the way I remember?  I have the picture of the Embassy marquee in my mind and actual change on the streets of New York can't take that away. It's as real to me as the bricks used to build that new apartment building.
     I was in danger of getting lost in the impossibly complicated subject of time and memory, when for no reason I can see, I thought about the many early peoples who didn't see time in the way we understand it. They lived with the cycles of their myths and the seasons, and each cycle gave birth to a new cycle, just the same. Time was circular, endlessly recurring. To understand time as we do, as linear, creating history, is a more recent view.
     Again, for no reason I could trace, I remembered the movie, Groundhog Day, which I can see again and again.There are many reasons to love it, but not the least is the way it taps into our conflicting feelings about time. We all know what it's like to want a particular good time to last forever. "Stay, moment, thou art so fair." But we also sense that it would be hell to be doomed to live in endless repetition. That's what happens to Bill Murray who finally in despair at his repetitive days tries to kill himself. He's hit bottom and then begins to change, becoming kind and happily part of the town community. His days begin to vary and that variety is his reward, until his transformation is complete and time can begin again.  
     Time and memory and movement... I want it all, sometimes for time to slow down and even stop, and sometimes to speed up and carry me forward into the new. This morning, I thought, well, Einstein had something original to say about time, but I don't, and then I thought that isn't exactly true. I have what we all have, my own particular, original memories and the connections they make, a sense of the flow of time, and how time and memory are constantly flowing though my consciousness. They're what give me my sense of myself.
      And having said that, it comes to me where all this interesting thinking about time has been leading me - back to where I am, the present moment, breathing in and out.