11

March 12, 2020: I’m writing this in real time. But what is real time? That might be the theme of this book. A good question might be, is time itself real or is just a mental trick of some kind invented by someone very, very smart? Is time used as a manipulative tool so that someone (or some group) can get their way? But that’s all conspiracy theory stuff and I’m much more into describing the events, no matter what time period in which they occurred.

After jumping on the train, I found myself in a virtually empty train car. During the Depression, commerce was way down so empty train cars were probably not that uncommon. The train car was surprisingly clean. It must have been used for boxed goods and supplies, not for livestock or livestock accessories such as hay. As you know, walking is my preferred mode of transportation, but this was the era of hobos and ordinary citizens hopping on trains in the dead of night, hopefully unawares and undetected, and I wanted to capture a sense of what that felt like. It wasn’t that bad of a feeling. Had a certain thrill and aura of uncertainty that tends to heighten the senses and get the blood moving. It’s comforting to postulate that in every situation that mankind has found itself in, it has learned to adjust to it and eventually either overcome it or outlast it.

I rode the train through the night, jumping out when it started to slow down. I didn’t want to be confronted by an irate railroad official so when I jumped off, I rolled into some bushes beside the track. I got up, dusted myself off, and started ambulating (since I use the word walk so much, I’m starting to consider synonyms) in a northerly direction. The sun was peeking over the horizon in the east. It was cold, but you got the feeling spring was not too far away.

A few hours later I was merrily strolling down a country road, when a female voice shouted at me, “Hey, young fella, can you lend an old lady a helping hand?” Before I get to what then happened, permit me to digress:

Let me be clear. Nothing is as exactly as it seems. If you understand that, you can make sense of things.

I repeat, let me be clear. Everything is exactly as it seems. If you understand that, you can make sense of things (that should probably go without saying).

Think of a linear scale from zero to ten. Zero represents nothing is as exactly as it seems. Ten represents everything is as exactly as it seems. Conspiracy nuts hover in the zero to two range while the gullible and the naïve stay around nine to ten. But reality is a sliding scale.

Eternity has a locked door. Most, if not all, who knock on the door will be allowed to enter. But once inside you can’t leave. Many will be delighted just to be in eternity’s foyer and will find it hard pressed to ever leave. Others will discover that eternity has a well-stocked pantry and will want to linger in eternity’s kitchen. Like Spanish style homes, eternity will have open courtyards in the middle of its initial complex. The grass will be soft, the air will be redolent, and the rays of eternity will filter through leaves of gold. Some will want to stay there indefinitely and rest and sleep.

But some will see if eternity has a back door and will attempt to unlock it. If successful, they will step out on eternity’s back porch. The view will be of a vast and imposing void. Once again, they can’t go back through the door. They can only venture into the void.

But there’s no rush. Eternity is very patient. It never runs out of time.

Now back to my hearing the female voice. It come from a small, wiry woman, somewhere in her late fifties or early sixties.

I asked, “What can I do for you?”

“I need someone to make sure I don’t kill myself.” She laughed when she saw the expression on my face, and then explained, “I was a trapeze artist in the circus for twenty-two years. Now I just do it to keep in shape. My son-in-law usually assists me, but he had business in town.”

“How about your husband?”

“He died five years ago. He fell and hit his head on concrete steps. Ironic in the sense we were both trapeze artists, flirting with death all those years. Then he dies in an accident walking down the back steps.”

We walked into the backyard where she had a trapeze apparatus set up. She was still quite agile and seemed to have no trouble doing all the stunts. My job was to catch her if she fell, which would have been easy, since she appeared to be as light as a feather.

I said bravo when she was finished. She invited me in for a cup of coffee.

Inside the house, a young woman was feeding a baby in a highchair.

“These two are my daughter and grandson. Since my husband passed away, my daughter, her husband and their child have been living with me. We do alright when compared to what some others are going through. When do you think it will end?”

She meant the Great Depression. It had been grinding on for over five years.

“That’s hard to say. Government can only do so much.”

“I hope it doesn’t take a war to get the economy going again.”

I agreed with her sentiments, but I couldn’t really comment on what she said. I just nodded my head.

I left before her son-in-law returned home. I hope his business outing was successful.

I was overly optimistic about spring being in the air. It started snowing a few hours before sundown. I decided the best thing to do was just to keep on plodding through the snow and through the night.

I had a vision in the night. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t dream when I sleep. But from time to time, I may have a vision or two. Fortunately, they usually come when I’m all alone. It can be embarrassing to have a vision in public or even among a few acquaintances. This particular vision had the feel of the 1980’s.

I was in some sort of an indoor shopping mall, but it wasn’t your typical mall. It was more like two city streets meeting at a right angle. The idea of it being a mall came from the fact that the streets had a roof and there were only walls on the other sides of the two streets. It was well-lighted and where the two streets met there was one store that utilized both streets with the door to the store exactly at the point where the two streets met. My vision only entailed that one store, but intuitively I knew more stores stretched along both streets (but only on one side of each street). The one store I did see, however, was mostly red in color with large multi-pane windows. But what was inside the store has faded from my memory.

Without memory, can we make sense of the world?

Isn’t it strange how our memories of the past change? Did what happen yesterday really happen? According to our memories, the answer is no. As I travel through the past, I see that memories aren’t just repositories of facts. They’re created by complex minds with both positive and negative agendas. They are acts of imagination. It’s like Christianity’s concept of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a figment of God’s imagination, but since God’s imagination is so powerful, the Holy Spirit becomes more than just a figment.

Most things begin with an idea. The Symbolic Kingdom is an idea. It is a work in progress and has a certain ‘ad hoc-ness’ to it. It is a day by day adventure and undertaking.

Only human beings care about abstractions. God is an abstraction, and the fact that we care about abstractions may be a proof that God is real. Only an abstraction can provoke an interest in an abstraction.

The biggest problem with the virgin birth of Jesus is that it totally disrupts the concept of cause and effect, which is a bedrock of man’s understanding of the natural world. Quantum physics may feebly point to the possibility of effect without cause, but very few, if any, in the scientific community would use quantum physics to explain the virgin birth. Jesus was born sans a human father. It just can’t be. Or can it?

But do we know the entire totality of what is truly natural? The concept of what is natural shouldn’t be defined by our limitations.

Better living through better technology. That’s what the high-tech companies are telling us. But there’s always something simmering beneath the surface. Remember the Sliding Scale?

It’s now 1957 and I’m somewhere in a rural area of the southeastern part of the country. I’m standing at the back of what was called then a general store. It’s a stand-alone building and is made out of wood and the wood has faded. It’s a one-story building more long than wide with double front doors. One of the front doors always stays open, except in the coldest of weather, which is rare in this part of the country. There is a screen door that rattles loudly when opened. The screen door is a little rickety, but it does help keep flies out during the summer.

When you walk in, a long counter runs to the right along the length of the store. Behind the counter is the store owner, who is both boss and sole employee. The wall behind the counter has shelves about eight feet high and are stocked with a variety of canned good, household cleaning products, and sundry sorts of things. I’m standing in front of a horizontal cooler that holds soft drinks. It’s midway the length of the left wall. I’ve chosen a Nehi grape drink and am about to pay for it when the screen door rattles, and an elderly farmer and a small boy walk into the store. The boy can’t be more than three or four years old. The clerk and farmer fall into a deep conversation (weather, crops, the new preacher, etc.) almost immediately while the small boy wanders around the store unimpeded. He’s been forgotten about. His wanderings take him behind the counter where he only spends a few moments. When he emerges from behind the counter, he’s brandishing a pistol in his tiny hands. This grabs the attention of the farmer, who turns out to be the boy’s grandfather and the store owner. Fortunately, nothing bad happens and the gun is returned, undischarged, to the store owner, who promises fervently to locate the gun in a place that is not accessible to small boys or anyone else for that matter.

The small boy may be in for the spanking of his life in the very near future, but for now the grandfather only picks the boy up, and without saying goodbye rushes out of the store

I pay for the drink, and say to the store owner, “You always have this much excitement?”

The store owner is still too shaken up to laugh. “Mister, that’s enough excitement for the rest of my life.”

Coloring books shouldn’t be just for children. There should be a coloring book designed for each one of us that would stay with us our entire lives. It would never run out of pages. We would keep experimenting with various colors and color combinations. Our collective goal would be to discover the color of reality.