Two Minutes From Tomorrow

There are times when I feel so much like Michael Martin Murphy's Boy From the Country it's not even funny. Down home, raised with dogs, horses and well water, we fought the battle of frozen pipes in winter, and as a fifth grader, I attended a virtual one-room schoolhouse. I've only been outside the United States once and that was to cross into Canada to see their side of Niagara Falls (it was worth the trip).

I'm thinking like this today because it's two minutes from tomorrow in northeastern Australia, where my friend and fellow blogger Crystal Mary Lindsey is at he

r desk. For anyone fascinated by time travel, the International Dateline is a gift from heaven. I realize, like Annie, it's always tomorrow somewhere, but the idea that there's a person on the other side of now who's already at then makes my head spin.

It gets even dizzier when you realize it's as though her words are hanging in mid-air, fifteen hours away, waiting for me to lasso them as we pass by. The image would have had my cowboy great-grandfather thinking I'd spent too much time in the local saloon. I could ask that of myself, except that I'm stone-cold sober and my coffee cup is freshly full.

People shed their innocence gradually. Some become cynical in the process, but most manage to hold onto more than enough to share a child's smile of delight at the first sight of Santa Claus in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Call it cock-eyed optimism, naivete, or plain foolery, it would be a shame to lose a sense of wonder even over those things we can explain. Blaise Pascal wrote, "the heart has its reasons (of) which reason knows nothing." In other words, while my brain calculates the hours from Maine to Brisbane, my heart still says, wow.


(Public domain image via Wikipedia)