Aunt Cathy

I saw you, just a few months before the end, and you said you felt fine—you were tough. You said we didn’t need to have that conversation, because there would be plenty of time for it later. So we sat on your porch and had coffee instead, talking about girlfriends and taxes and car rides.

As a child, there always seemed to be plenty of time. Life just turned over: schooldays to weekends, school years to summer vacation, baseball season to baseball season. If time existed it wasn’t fleeting, it was just taking the long way home. You were with me then, at baseball games and orchestra concerts, at birthday parties and homecoming dances, on fishing trips and house boats. Life was just waiting for things to turn over: for the next concert, the next birthday, the next fishing trip. And there would always be a next. There was plenty of time.

We were staying at your house one weekend and you had bought us a racetrack with miniature electric cars that went around and around. It only took a few seconds to make a lap, but it didn’t matter how many times they came buzzing back to the starting line, we would just go again. I think at once of memory. I close my eyes and see us together: I’m seven and playing on your porch and then I’m seventeen and you’re teaching me how to drive until suddenly I’m twenty four and I haven’t had a chance to say goodbye. So I close my eyes and I go around again. Around and around. Racing to the past and hurrying back a few seconds later. There is plenty of time, if only in the past.

The light from most stars only reaches us after thousands of years, vintage projectors in the night sky flickering out the past. Perhaps some day we’ll be able to zoom in, and watch an aunt racing miniature electric cars around a racetrack with her nephew, several thousand lightyears away and several thousand years later. Perhaps some far off alien planet can do this already, and to them we’re still racing those cars around our track and around again.

If so, then perhaps there’s still time to say goodbye: the light from our star is still traveling out into the cosmos carrying us with it. If so, then somewhere in the cold and endless emptiness of space, the image of an aunt and nephew playing together is shooting past at unimaginable speed. If so, then buzzing off in every conceivable direction are scenes and clips of us together, home movies being flickered out into the firmament. When they reach the end—if there is an end—maybe we’ll need to say goodbye. But maybe we’ll just head back, looping around the other side of the universe, ready to go again.