Q’adima/Israel, Thursday early AM:
I’d watched the little Lucite box set into my ceiling for a couple hours, as the clock neared 6 AM.
With an access door on the top, and then ‘my’ little door on the bottom, I can only ever see vague movement inside it; shadows.
And so I was watching when I heard the sounds of footsteps on the tin roof, heard the upper latch release, and saw, only for a second, a moving hand toss something into it. Oddly, the moment the door opened the box became almost black inside for the few seconds.
But I’m used to ‘odd’ by now.
Grabbing my stepladder and setting it up under the box, I hastily un-did the little latch on my door, Now lit-up inside from the approaching dawn here, I reached in and retrieved the $1000. Ten crisp hundreds, cool to the touch, and even ‘cooler’ to a fellow who’s been frightfully broke for much too long.
Thank God for the Box. If it weren’t for the ‘fail-safe’ mechanism preventing both doors being opened at once, I would have reached in and shaken my trusted tenant’s hand, somewhere ‘over’ (‘up’? ‘down’?) there… wherever he is/ was.
Lancaster County PA, USA: 11PM Wednesday:
It’d taken Rob till almost midnight to finish work, stop by the bank, fight traffic homeward, help his wife feed the young kids, count his own meager finances. Some things just take as long as they take, but he’d promised to do the deposit.
A long ladder he keeps safely resting on the ground along the garden wall; Rob set it up against the eaves of the centuries-old log house. In the darkness he carefully climbed up and crawled the couple feet to where the Lucite box was sunk into the cedar-shake roof, opened the trapdoor, and tossed the bills into it. The light suddenly shining out of it was disconcerting to his dark-adjusted eyes, and after closing the door he wisely allowed his pupils to re-accommodate before descending to the lawn. His cell-phone chirped ’11 PM’ .’ Great’, he thought to himself. ‘I’m happy, he’s happy; what a wonderful planet!’
And so I sit on the edge of my bed, putting on my shoes still dirty from yesterday’s concrete job. Off to work, but wait: there’s still time for fleeting but deep thoughts about Time, Space, Distance, and Simultaneity…
Were Rob and I actually in the the same world, for a moment?
The imaginary-but technically-possible telephoto shot from The Moon seemed to confirm it, yet their ‘time-stamp‘ was ‘late’ by a second or so. Speed of light… or Reality?
One big issue to fix, ‘first things first’ is to toss into the trash that silly ‘Time-Zone’ source of confusion and cognitive duhs:
‘Different Strokes (of Midnight) for Different Folks’? Who needs it? I’m thinking we would be wiser to do without.
Give the folks at Greenwich a cheap and painless ‘why not?’ honorary medal. ‘World Time’ (aka GMT, UCT.’ Rob, my US benefactor and I can then shake hands at an easily-remembered ‘0400 hours GMT‘ on both of our clocks. Kinda…
I’ll not belabour the Einsteinian time-like/space-like separation issue. Who even knows; the nano-second-critical act of our hands clasping, in our disallowed ‘mixed-frame of reference’, might be observed by most anyone else as a ‘mutual annihilation’ explosion’ as the electrons in the outer layers of our separate skins seek to reconcile their quantum vibration wave-forms. Only a carefully-chosen point on the Moon’s surface will see it as a nice gesture of gratefulness.
Luckily, we survive quite well ignoring real, physical, hidden, aspects of our modern life here.
And the money will go to a good cause: school taxes, textbooks, whose carbo-hydrate covers might have at least some nutritive value for today’s students.
Thank God, Michelson, Morley, and the folks in the title for the Box. Look ’em up; so they shouldn’t have died in vain.
