Time

And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun. But it's sinking. Racing around to come up behind you again ... Pink Floyd

Time is moving too quickly. I have too much to do and I’ve never been good at multitasking. I’m up to my old tricks, stealing the hours from 11pm till 2 am to decompress. My downtime is infused with online Scrabble and McConnell’s Toasted Coconut Almond Chip. I’d feel better physically if I laid off the sugar and went to bed earlier but I’m terrified of having another bad dream. The interrupted REM cycles offer some protection from the mash-up of all my subconscious worries. In the last nightmare I was a 57-year-old childless single woman working for my mother, covered in tattoos and about to get breast implants. If you know me, you’ll know that the scariest part of that dream is the implants.

I wake up groggy and begin paging through the grain-free cookbook, a vestige of our post-pandemic attempt to eat healthier. As I peruse recipes for a flourless dessert to bring to Passover seder with my husband’s family, our son Harry comes in to show us the trailer for the new Deadpool and Wolverine movie. I’m a huge X-Men fan, and it looks amazing. My only question is:

“Where does this movie fall within the time-space continuum?”

“It’s in the Multiverse” Harry explains.

Loki, Vision, and Agatha Harkness - a Marvel Halloween 2021

Now that Disney owns the whole MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) and the TVA (Time Variance Authority) is MCU canon, characters from different worlds will collide. Will Ben Affleck or Charlie Cox appear as Daredevil? Or will they both? Will hell freeze over so that Michael Fassbender can do a cameo as Magneto? As much as I want to nerd out on all the possibilities, there are too many things to do in this present timeline, things like:

1.    Exchange peach colored Hokas for more versatile white ones.

2.    Deal with the American Express password issue.

3.    Write a sympathy note to my stepmother. Think about how life is short.

4.    Write excuse note for son who is missing school for Passover but is really missing school because it’s Senior Ditch Day.

5.    Make a list of ingredients for husband to pick up at grocery store. Sense that this will somehow go awry.

6.    Text older son in New York to wish him a Happy Passover. Wonder if you’ll hear back.

This is only a partial list, provided mostly to explain/justify why I chose not to go to the market myself. I decide to Google “What is Passover” so I don’t make the same mistake I made that time I brought an apple pie to a seder. I may have been Jewish in a past life, but in this one I was raised Catholic and I’m not totally clear on the no-grain rule since matzo is made with flour. The first generic definition that pops up is from Time Magazine: “Passover is a Jewish holiday that celebrates the Israelites being freed from slavery in Egypt.” The Jews were in a big hurry and didn’t have time for the bread to rise, which is where the tradition of eating unleavened bread (matzo) began. As the story goes, God punished the Egyptians with ten plagues, the final one being the death of the firstborn son. The Jews marked their doors with lamb’s blood so the angel of death would “Pass Over” their houses.

My own first-born son, Maxwell, responds to my text with a “Happy Pesach” and I feel like I’ve won the lottery. He’s a man of few words. Google informs me that, in addition to Passover, today is also Earth Day. My most cherished Earth Day memory is when Maxwell as a fifth grader lead the All School Meeting, playing “Johnny B. Goode” on his electric guitar while kids paraded around in recyclables at the annual “Trashion Show”. Memories like these make me wish time didn’t pass so quickly. There were some wonderful years at Wildwood elementary watching my boys grow up. In another universe I am still there, painting that Jog-a-Thon Banner, organizing the watermelon eating contest at Gardenpalooza.

Maxwell’s Earth Day ASM 2013

I clean out the pantry in preparation for making dessert while listening to Instagram reels in the background. There’s a full moon in Scorpio and Mercury is Retrograde; this is a time of massive transition, the astrologer with a vaguely Eastern European accent warns. She’s right about that. Both sons are graduating, one from high school and the other from college. One is coming back home and the other, the one who managed to avoid leaving California every summer of his entire life, will be going to Boston. I am in my second Saturn return, which means big change is also coming for me. The details are fuzzy, but with Saturn making the journey only every 28.5 years, you know it’s going to be epic.

My husband’s trip to Whole Foods, as I intuited, does not go well. He cannot find the arrowroot. Or the pecans. He calls and texts me relentlessly, no less than six times, calling out the names of every alternative flour on the shelf – coconut flour, casava flour, oat flour, sorghum flour. I finally suggest that he ask someone who works at the store because I’m trying to write, but by then my concentration has been obliterated. I feel like the Jews making their exodus out of Egypt. I have no time to write this essay! Should I just make some half-baked list instead? Where did the day go? I must now make a flourless chocolate cake and grain-free lemon bars in under an hour. It’s like the dreaded Master Chef pressure test.

Somewhere out there in the Multiverse there’s another version of me doing things differently, being okay with store-bought dessert, making better career choices, eating less ice cream, living in a brownstone in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. I wonder which parts of my life are governed by free will and which ones are destiny. Could those fond memories of my kids’ childhoods in L.A. have taken place at a similar progressive K-12 school in Brooklyn, like St. Ann’s? In a darker timeline, I’m single and childless with even bigger boobs working in some corporate job where I’m referred to as “a creative”. I toggle between LinkedIn and Tinder, lacking the bandwidth to attempt greatness, leaving work early to hit the gym, promising to circle back on those deliverables.

The Multiverse is like that Robert Frost poem but with an exponential number of paths. If you select the wrong one, is it possible to course correct or must you live out your days in St. Louis, hoping that, like Barry Allen a.k.a. The Flash, a variant of you is crushing it on Earth 57? I can’t bear to think about it, and I don’t really have the time.