Bourbon and Milk: On Time

Bourbon and Milk dives into the perplexing spaces parenting sometimes pushes us, and explores the unexpected ways writers may grow in them. If you’re interested in joining the conversation, query Giuseppe Taurino at: giuseppe [at] americanshortfiction.org.

—

This past summer, for the first time in ten years, I didn’t work on a book. I’d been working on one difficult book or another since before I got pregnant with my son—he is nine now—and even the thought of beginning another difficult, many-year project made me want to take a very long nap. I had already started telling people I was working on another book—a book length essay about disaster—but if I’m being honest, I hadn’t really started anything yet. The most recent book had been difficult to write—difficult on the heart and the mind—and then difficult to talk about and read from once it was out in the world. I’d started working on that book when my daughter was seven. She’ll be thirteen this December, and in six years she’ll be starting college. Almost her whole life I’ve been focused on my work, trying to catch up for the time I took away from my career to care for her and her brother, but soon she’ll have moved out, and he’ll follow right behind, and though I plan to have a long career, there’s no way to get the time of their childhood back once it’s gone.

Before the summer began, I told myself I wouldn’t research (very much) or write drafts or travel away to a residency. I wouldn’t tour or promote or write proposals for anything. I would be, simply, present in this little window of time that I had. I would exercise and read—or not. I’d watch movies and nap. For all of July, my children and I had nothing scheduled, and I realized that with all this time stretching out in front of us, we could take a long trip, so I found a cabin in Montana on three hundred acres of mostly forest where there was no cable or wifi or even cell reception. We planned to be there three weeks—two of those I’d be single-parenting while my husband was back in Houston working very hard at his job. The first week, when he traveled with us to Montana, we took an overnight trip away from the cabin to Glacier National Park. I’d wanted to see a glacier as long as I could remember and imagined they’d be visible from wherever I stood in the park: glaciers visible from the trails and the road, glaciers blanketing mountainsides and entire mountain peaks. When we arrived, I saw it wasn’t like that at all.

We chose one of the easiest trails for a short day hike, and even still, my children announced just as we lost sight of the car that they were hungry and thirsty, and—because they had already suffered about three and a half days without access to screens of any kind—they insisted we finish the hike and return to the hotel we had booked for the night so they could watch television. We hiked into the forest despite their protests, past waterfalls, through fern groves and clearings where every surface was covered by a dense green moss that, when inspected more closely, was itself covered by tiny white flowers that looked more like dew from a distance of even a few inches. We hiked for hours until the trees parted for a deep blue lake, carved out of the mountain by a glacier that had long since melted and disappeared. The map we had used as a reference said that a glacier would be visible from the beach, but when we looked at the mountainside, the glacier was gone.

We had arrived at Glacier National Park a little too late to see glaciers, it seemed. Though the park was home to one hundred and fifty at its founding in 1910, it has fewer than thirty glaciers now, none of which are visible except by way of long and difficult hikes that can be challenging for even experienced climbers—almost impossible for inexperienced children prone to constant hunger and complaining—and even these remaining glaciers are shrinking at alarming rates. Scientists estimate that within a decade or so, the two largest remaining glaciers in Glacier National Park will become what glaciologists call “dead ice,” and from there it will be only a short time until they melt completely.

We hiked back to the car, drove to the ice cream parlor, and let the children have two scoops of ice cream each—a bribe we had offered in exchange for an end to their complaining. On the drive back to the cabin, we listened to a climate report on the radio, and the urgency of the moment arrived, as it so often has these last few years, in its full force. Glaciers are melting; the Amazon rainforest burns. A hurricane destroys an entire island community. The ocean bubbles up from manholes into the streets of Miami. My children are thirteen and nine now—is it delusional to plan for college? Do I even need to bother with a will? Is it time to sell all our possessions and find an off-grid cabin with an underground well in the hills? What do we do with the brief time we are given? What do we do with the time we have—even if it is only this very moment, right now, today?

On that particular day, we ate in a diner by the highway and talked about some of the things that are in our power to do. We can stop eating meat. We can plant trees. We can consume less fossil fuel. We can buy fewer things. I knew, but did not say, that small personal choices will not save us. Our civilization and the way we relate to the earth and one another must change.

My husband returned to Houston. Montana entered a drought. Each day, as the temperature rose, the air and the forest grew drier. Locals warned us of the chance of wildfires—one had destroyed whole swaths of the state the previous year. Without cable or wifi or a radio signal or cell reception, we couldn’t get the news and had no idea what was going on in the rest of the world. As I felt increasingly panicked, my daughter started going on short hikes in the morning by herself, taking along the walkie-talkie and calling back with updates every few steps. “I’m at the barn,” she said, the static crackling in her voice. “I just saw a hawk . . .  I’m at the edge of the forest . . .  It really is so beautiful out here.”

My son found that he loved to splash in the stream that ran past the cabin, so we piled in the truck and drove down to the river, where the water was higher, faster, and ice cold. We stacked rocks in a little inlet for a dam; leaned sticks against a log for a shelter. A few days later, we drove to the Bison Range—a federal project intended to bring bison back from the brink of extinction caused by the federal project of eradication—but didn’t see very many bison that day. Instead we saw eagles, deer, and tide lines carved high into the mountains from Glacial Lake Missoula—a prehistoric lake that covered much of Western Montana at the end of the last ice age.

The world has seen so many geologic changes between then and now, so many of them in the last century. It is difficult to wrap our heads around the consequences of our actions and decisions on time at that scale. I tell my creative writing students that Greek has three words for time: chronos, which is chronological time; aionis, which is everlasting time, biblical time—time understood as an eternal whole; and kairos, which is an opportune time, a tiny window of time. Our linear experience of time means we remember the past, and the stories we tell become the memory of who we are, but we do not have memories of the future, nor do we tell stories of the people we hope to become. Each day we have access to only the intimate time we call the present: the time we spend sitting with a cheek pressed against a sleeping child’s hair, brushing teeth together at the same sink, running errands in the car. But we have hardly any words for the way time passes through and beyond us: our most precious moments we measure in seconds, minutes, weeks. We place no value on millennia. Beyond that, time is practically worthless. Eons. Ages.

At the end of the three weeks, as we packed up to return to Houston, I kept thinking about something Tennessee Williams writes in “The Catastrophe of Success”: “Time is short and it doesn’t return again,” he says. “It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, Loss, Loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.”

It is easy to look at the world and see loss everywhere: to see climate refugees prevented from crossing every border but death, to see the rainforests burn, the Arctic permafrost burn, to see the bleaching of the coral reefs, to see the Greenland ice sheet lose eleven billion tons of ice in a single day, to know that this year, for the first time in human history, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has exceeded 415 ppm, to know that next year there will be more; to know that we may not be able to keep the global temperature from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius because in certain hot spots the temperature has already exceeded that; to know there will be more catastrophic storms in the future, not fewer, more wildfires and droughts—more species endangered, and gone suddenly extinct; to know the world will go on warming after it has become uninhabitable for us, and warmer still long after we are gone. There will be catastrophes, even if we act right now; there will be worse catastrophes if we do nothing at all.

But the losses of this present moment can also teach us more than sorrow, I think, because though loss makes time feel smaller and more scarce, love makes time more plentiful. To love is to fully inhabit the time we are given with the beloved, brief as it may be, and to understand time to be our most precious resource.

Back in Houston, my daughter started seventh grade; my son made a new friend. Sometimes I look at them, when they don’t even see me looking, and it’s almost like I can see into the future, or that I remember it, just for a moment, then it’s gone. I did finally begin work on another difficult book, but for the first time in over ten years, I wasn’t trying to reclaim time I thought I’d lost in the past, but to open the window of the present wider—wide enough to accommodate more than one possible future; wide enough for the people we may yet still become.