THE DOPPLER EFFECT Julie Goldschmidt Schlossberg (one person) and I exchanged some thoughts about age and time at our 70th-birthday-party planning meeting. That we – any of us – would talk about these things is inevitable these days. The exchange, brief as it was, motivated me to write about it, and now I'd like to share my thoughts with all of you. Time. It is a realm with neither form nor sound. Or perhaps it is a realm that is formed by form and sound. In either case, I've learned that there is nothing more substantial or more permeable. Thinking about it, as I grow older – as we grow older, has become a preoccupation. An affliction might be a more accurate way to put it. Like arthritis, I assume that it shall only intensify – worsen – with the passage of time. “The passage of time.” Now there's a phrase that fails to communicate. Too feeble. Even the word passage seems to connote something that moves slowly, which, of course, belies the reality that is Time. In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, I prefer the sweep of rotating blades on a time piece to that of a digital display because the former gives a sense of the sweep of time, however illusory that may prove to be. Its passage is broken down into the conventional components of seconds, minutes, hours. I can look at such a clock and observe that each of its hands traverse so many degrees of arc. Thus can I think about time as a certain distance traveled. It is only retrospectively that I discover that all the hands on my time piece are actually spinning rather rapidly, and that I am a prisoner of all 360 degrees of arc in revolutions that are repeated over and over again. But in the present moment, I can enjoy the illusion – the decelerated version of time. The digital display, on the other hand, warps time. It leaps over it. Now
ya see it, now ya don't. I mean, I look at the digital time piece and it reads
8:29. No, wait, it reads 8:46. No, wait.... There is no distance, no measure
of it. So, I would rather think about the passage of time versus its disappearance. Am I getting through to you? It is the digital age. So, I could be in front of a giant, plasma, flat-screen TV that is magically beaming the scans of an uber high-definition, Blue-ray video disc of my uber-ephemeral life. But I'd rather watch images projected by a 16 millimeter movie projector. It emits a cone of light that illuminates floating dust particles and blue cigarette smoke as it shines across the darkened room to a silver screen. The ratcheting sound of the celluloid as it is tracked mechanically from reel to reel gives time the backdrop of sound, after all. On the screen are projected images of my early childhood, my high school years, the first time I got laid, work, marriage, kids.... The scenes run by at an ever accelerating pace until they become a blur. Images seem to fade away, followed by white hash marks flitting on the screen that has turned dark; some numbers start flashing. Then, no projection. No sound. Afterward, I think about what I had seen. Thus, in thought, I can see some of the images clearly enough. They're the first ones that flickered on the screen. My eldest son, 11 years old, is on the stage, at the piano, playing a sonata for the left-hand because his broken right arm is in a sling. My second son races into the shallows of right field to take the relay from the weak arm of the little kid in the outfield (who had just been startled into consciousness by the cacophonous screeching of his teammates), then rotating towards home plate on one foot, almost in a spin of balletic gracefulness, fires the ball just in time for the catcher to tag out the second-base runner, who had rounded third with too much confidence. My daughter is pedaling away from me for the first time sans training wheels on her bicycle. I am amazed at how fast she is moving. Moments. Frozen time. Whatever it is, everyone on that screen lives on without so much as a hair out of place, with the clarity of events that just happened – just a moment ago. Can it be, then, that time is comprised of these eternal moments, one accreting on top of the other, so that ultimately there is this huge heap of moments that live on forever – an Everest that, though impossible to fully sort through, stands here, in this place, in the present. All of us, from time to time (there I go again) wander through such mountain ranges of visions and stories. At our planning meeting, Burt Weinberg and I were commiserating about what lousy students we were. Our fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Young, saw fit to promote both of us to fifth grade, but only on “trial,” which I guess meant that fourth grade, like some kind of ogre, could grab us back at any moment. I had some familiarity with such a monster, since it held me captive in first grade whilst everyone else, my sister included, went on to second grade. And as we continued to wander through some of those passages together, Burt and I stumbled over the memory of Mrs. Potter. Amazing! I am absolutely sure that I have not thought about that woman ever since – what was it, Burt, 6th grade? Yet there she was, clear as can be – thick, dark-colored eyeglass frames over a vapid smile, post-like ankles descending from the hem of lose-hanging curtains of fabric down to flat, thick-heeled shoes, each with a thick strap around the bulbous heel of the foot. It's strange, now that I think about it, how the memories of my grade school teachers that are the easiest to access are those that are tied to what they looked like, as opposed to how they behaved or talked. Mrs. Young had blond, shoulder-length hair. Mrs. Brenwasser was thin, had shapely legs in dark hose. The pink face and white hair belonged to the Horace Mann principal, Mr. Cummings. Recently I had a conversation with Bill Currie who observed – correctly and depressingly – that Time is a relative phenomenon. He pointed out that at the age of 10, when one year spans 10% of life, Time moves by at a snail's creep. When we graduated from South Shore, a year of time for most of us was still significant at more than 5.5% of life. At 70, it's another story completely. One year sprints past, barely pausing for what is now less than 1.50% of life. The arithmetic informs us that one year at the age of 70 flashes by at a rate that is almost 75% faster than it did at the age of 18, more than 85% faster than at the age of 10. Creep. Sprint. Flash. Thus do we see the permutations of the March of Time. My bet is that the phrase Time flies was coined by someone who has hair growing out of the ears and long ago bid adieu to the endless summers of childhood. Yes, we are riding a rocket now – straight into the realm of exponentiation...and cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Though I told Bill to keep his fricken observations to himself, I'm afraid that I have come to a similar conclusion about the increasing speed of lapsing time. I would compare it to a law of physics – specifically, the Doppler effect, which you might remember from high-school physics, which I never took. So, it must have been something I learned in college. I think it was at Wilson Junior College, where, for a brief interlude, I was editor-in-chief of the Wilson College Press – an achievement that until this day still strikes me as . . . an achievement. Morris Tish was the chairman of the English department, as well as the faculty sponsor/mentor of the school newspaper. We knew him as “Mister Tish,” mostly in deference to his persona as an erudite, well-read, sarcastic, quick-witted, passionate man, just this side of obnoxious. He, in the regality of his powers, knighted me editor for a school semester. Great honor. Learned more from him about the use of language than anyone, with the possible exception of Roosevelt University's Mrs. Steadman, who taught me to love Shakespeare. Genius. I mean, anyone who can so memorably meld two people into one person, so that a fornicating couple becomes the singular beast with two backs, has got to be a genius. Buck Brown was a genius, too. He was the cartoonist for the Wilson College Press. Did a comic strip. Later, he would become the Playboy magazine cartoonist for about two score years. Snap of a finger. His cartoon character Granny (with the sagging tits) was a staple. I just learned that he died three years ago. Amazing how that fact makes me feel so sad. For Christ's sake, he was just a few years my senior. I knew him for just a year or two, 48 years ago. Hadn't seen him since my days at Wilson. So he lingers in memory as a young man, as handsome as his wife was beautiful. Both of them, tall and beautiful is the way I remember them. Thus has the mortality of others become the more frequent reminder of our own. Yes, it's time for that, too. We're all going through it. Starting to read the newspaper death notices, which is something that never interested me before. I recently buried my eldest brother Ronald. And the apparition of my other big brother Marshall, who died so many years ago – yesterday, visits me with increasing frequency. And his beautiful wife Rosalie just passed on, as well. Of all the aunts and uncles who populated our world as youngsters, only Uncle George remains. Aunt Florence, his wife, recently traveled to that undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns. My twin sister Barbara and I are the youngest of my parents' progeny. We're old and the youngest. A paradox. I wonder if we will live long enough to see the years squeezed into seconds, which is what I expect happens at the moment of finality. The Singularity. Lingering on that notion of paradox for a moment, not too long ago, I had another conversation with Bill Currie about a friend of his, a playwright, whose play was recently performed at the Goodman Theatre. Bill explained that the play is about the dynamics of a dysfunctional Jewish family and that lots of profane language is used to portray the dysfunctionality and that because of that some Jews who attended the performances were very upset at the portrayals. “Jews don't behave that way!” was the complaint of one in particular, an “elderly woman.” I said to Bill, “Well, that's the “older generation.” When Bill reminded me that we are the older generation it took me aback. The first thought that flashed through my mind was, Jesus Christ! That's right! But how can it be that the woman who registered her complaint is my peer, not my senior, not my mom, for example? Can it be that the “elderly woman” would look upon me as an “elderly man”? Can it be that almost a year has already flashed by since we all gathered at our 50th-year class reunion? It was truly wonderful to see so many from the past. The Past. It's like a place. And in that place is the essence of who we are. So many of us haven't changed an iota. And if you could ignore the visual signs of age you could truly return to that place, find that nook in one of the mountain walls, go back to it, as we had done. So many of us had commented about it, passionately. And as wonderful as it was to have those feelings resurrected, I could not help but reflect on those classmates of ours who died. Lowell Myers. No! Linda Haskell. God help me! Richard Anderson. John Kane. Diane Doty. Shelly Lewis. Others. How can that be? Even now, every time I recall that they are gone, I shudder. They all reside in memory as young and healthy and as beautiful as we were, in those days, immortal. Just recently (in 1842), Christian Doppler observed that as waves – sound or the electromagnetic ones – arrive at receptors – our ears or eyes, for example – their frequencies progressively increase. For instance, as the locomotive approaches the place where I happen to be standing, it's sound grows louder and its pitch, higher, and when it passes and moves into the distance, the reverse happens. The easiest way to understand what is actually happening is to imagine that you are playing catch and that you and your partner possess the particular knack of being able to throw the ball so that it travels at a very specific velocity – let's say, 30 miles per hour. At the beginning of the game, you stand at a distance of 30 miles apart, and, predictably, your partner's first toss of the ball takes one hour to reach you. After each toss, you and your partner move toward each other by a distance of, oh, let's say exactly four miles, so that now the ball must travel a distance of 22 miles, then a distance of 14 miles, etc. Before you know it, the ball seems to be coming at you faster and faster – not because of an increase in its velocity but because of the shrinkage of distance. Well, Time is like that – except in reverse. Be well forever, my friends – at least from my perspective. – Love, Stuart |