Quartz Crystal Oscillator

"Two."

"What is your full name?"

"Two."

"How old are you?"

"Two."

"He really can say his full name. What is your full name?"

"Two. Twotwotwotwotwo." The little boy held up the forefinger on each hand and pushed them together.

I nodded. "That's right. One plus one equals two."

"Two."

"How old is your brother?"

"Two."

"Uh-huh."

The mother turned to her infant son. "No, you're nine months old, aren't you?"

The little boy bent the yellow pipe cleaner. "An arch."

The father turned to me. "Did he just say 'arch?'"

I nodded.

"There's a future engineer for you. We're designing flying buttresses at home." The father smiled at me.

I nodded again and looked down at the strawberry pretzel salad on my lunch plate. My wife and I had stopped at Blue Willow Cafe on our way to Chattanooga to look at some stone cuttings we'd ordered. I cut into the salad with my fork and imagined it was a soft piece of red-and-white rock that had transformed into edible food. Hey, if the moon can be made of green cheese, why can't our planet be made of fruit-flavored gelatin?

AND THEN IT HAPPENED.

I felt the ground under my feet get loose. The room started jiggling. The kids in the room were giggling. The parents were smiling. All was normal and yet...

I looked at my wife. She nodded, knowing without speaking that a major change had occurred. She silently signaled for me to order dessert, hoping that a last course of sugary food would return our planet to normal.

"Excuse me, miss. We'd like a Coca-Cola cake and an ooey gooey cake."

"Sure thing. Anything else? Oh, I'll get your plates for you, if you're done."

My wife and I nodded. We looked at the ceiling, the walls and the floor. The change was still there but what was it?

You see, I don't believe in magic. I live in the moment, which exists after the previous moment which had a practical explanation for its existence, leading to the next moment which is now the previous moment because I'm now in the next moment. In any case, every moment exists, doesn't exist, has an explanation, and then goes on to the next moment. Quite simple, really.

Despite all that, my wife and I have lived in moments in which some objects had no meaning and some effects had no apparent causes. You know, everyday life, like those days when a person walks up to you and says something totally incoherent for no reason whatsoever. But then some moments seem completely disconnected from previous and following moments. Like right now.

I look down at the dessert while I write this passage. The cake or pie or large slice of brownie is like a biscuit or soft scone with a layer of egg custard in the middle with tiny trails of caramel dancing across the plate and over the crust, while at the same time the boy, his brother, his mother and father across the room are holding imaginary forks in their hands and eating my dessert, then proceeding to eat my wife's. By the time I get around to jabbing my fork into the ooey gooey innards, there's really nothing left for my imagination to devour.

Thank goodness the Earth's crust is now a giant strawberry pretzel salad. That also explains this moment, the iron rust that makes clay red and the aluminum that permeates the ground that doesn't cause dementia.

A water clock becomes a pendulum clock becomes a quartz clock becomes an atomic clock seconds away from going off but never will because its half-life is like cutting a second into twos over and over again, getting infinitely closer to never striking midnight. Nothing makes sense anymore and because it's the next moment, nothing has to make sense because the previous moment no longer exists and I can't really prove it did. Can you?

Just because you and I stood together and had a conversation together doesn't mean we shared the same moment. None of us really knows what the other person saw or experienced. I see a baby begging for food. You look at your child for signs of significant behaviour changes. The person next to you thinks about her new great-grandchild. The server thinks about the food on the floor she has to clean up after you're gone. Which one of our moments is the right one? What about the people thinking about us in the other room, listening to our conversations and making comments to their companions in response, which we hear in the back of our thoughts and change our conversations without knowing why?

The earth changed to strawberry pretzel salad today. Did you see it? Did you bend down and eat it? Did your toddler taste it? Can you really believe it?