The last working analog clock in the house died today at age 28. With regular battery changes, it had been faithfully telling time since 1994 when I received it in recognition for a stint at a startup company. I took it apart but could not diagnose the problem with its tired little motor, so I laid it to rest. In some limited ways I suppose it still experiences time like the rest of the inanimate world, but it no longer artificially divides time into the discrete little ticks we call seconds or builds those into minutes and hours to display for our benefit.
I noticed my clock’s demise just as I sat down to write today. This was eerily appropriate because I was working on a short piece about a recent Celebration of Life for my dear friend, Laurie Rogers. He passed away in February of 2020, but the gathering was postponed for two years because of the Covid pandemic. Sadly, those two years passed without Laurie in them, as will all future years.
Time itself continues like an infinite moving sidewalk carrying our own personal timelines with it, but Dr. Lawrence D. Rogers stepped off the sidewalk two years ago at age 79, having made our lives immeasurably richer while he was on the journey with us. Laurie made us better people through his kindness, his wisdom, his leadership, his humor, and his love. Time knows nothing of these things, but it carries them forward within those of us still on the journey. And if we cooperate, it can do the same for those who follow us.
I was thinking of my friend as I wondered how to use my time the day after his life’s celebration, in the few hours before my flight home. His timeline and mine had overlapped from 1979 through 2020: in a research center in Sorrento Valley, in a small office across a chain-link fence from the Miramar Naval Air Station, at FBI Headquarters in Washington D.C., on the water aboard Laurie’s sailboat named Freelance, and under the water in scuba gear off the coasts of La Jolla and the Coronado Islands of Mexico. This led me to think about my other overlaps, and I set off to revisit a few of the places where those occurred.
I drove up the southern California coast from Del Mar, passing several beaches where I surfed with friends as a young man, remembering the best waves, the best people—the waves long gone and two of the people with them. I ended my northward progress at the last house I owned with my first wife in Carlsbad, taking a picture of it before heading back south. I visited the gravesites of my mother and father in Sorrento Valley and spent time there in quiet contemplation. I stopped by UCSD and walked through the Applied Physics and Mathematics building where I spent four years of my life in the early 1970s. I took pictures of a new house in Pacific Beach on the same lot where I grew up in its predecessor. And finally, I paused at a special place on the coast just south of La Jolla, a spot that Donna and I call “the niche,” where we and our children spent many happy moments.
Imagine a map of the world crisscrossed with a continuous line representing all your travels—a kind of space-time line stretching from the beginning of your life to the present moment—touching places within your house, around your town, your country, the world. Then, overlaying yours, imagine similar lines for each of the people you know. There will be many intersections between yours and theirs, places where you and they have been, but not necessarily concurrently, passing in the night of time. Now imagine the subset of those intersections that are concurrent, that share the same moments in time. Color them green and raise them above the surface of the map like little pushpins. There will be many fewer, but those green four-dimensional intersections are the special ones. They are the points of celebration, friendship, love, conflict, understanding, misunderstanding, opportunities for growth both realized and unrealized, shared life.
During Laurie’s Celebration of Life and a dinner that evening, new green dots had appeared on my map as I shared space and time with old friends and acquaintances, some of whom I hadn’t seen in over forty years. Then, during my drive the next day, I had wanted to re-intersect with parts of my own line. I had wanted to loop back around to experience those places and times again. The former I could physically do. The latter was possible only in my mind, but it felt almost as real. Many little green dots were there amidst the tangle of old lines on my map. Like Laurie’s, a few of the lines had definite endpoints, and no more green dots would ever appear along those. But many lines, like mine, continued forward, future green dots still possible.
Back home again, I removed my deceased clock from its shelf, felt its weight in my hand as if it contained 28 solid years of life, and carefully placed it in a closed cabinet alongside my desk. I don’t need to see it anymore, but I can’t bear to throw it away yet either. It reminds me of the bright green dots at important intersections along my finite little line.
Like Laurie’s and everyone else’s, my line will find its endpoint someday. Not being a theist, I don’t anticipate any form of eternal life, but while I admit that finiteness feels strange at times, it doesn’t scare me. In fact, it has a big upside. It makes this single life, right now, with all its messy tangles and beautiful green dots, that much dearer. It makes it that much more urgent to use time, talents, and resources wisely, and to spread kindness wherever and whenever possible—all things Laurie did so well with his time.