What About the Clouds
My friend keeps his receipts. I learn this after we buy Gatorade and bananas from a grocery store in the Philly suburbs. He asks me for the receipt before I can crumple it up and stuff it into the back pocket of my jeans where it would likely go through the wash a week later. This friend has an amazing memory; he is my childhood search engine. I give him the receipt and he folds it neatly into his wallet. I don't tell him that I'm grateful. Something about this moment beyond our memories can now be tracked down, won’t slip away.
We're all exhausted by thinking about time; how the future becomes the present and then instantly the past. Most of us would prefer to be freed of the constant reminder of this trite reality. I’ve heard people say time isn’t linear as if it were a fact. But time is linear. What I think they mean is that time doesn’t feel linear. I’m grateful that we can’t see time; I imagine walking on the shoulder of a busy interstate.
Mid-flight from Chicago to Central Pennsylvania, I wonder who is keeping track of the clouds. Should someone keep track of the clouds? Should every cloud have its own record? The advanced statistics kept in professional sports is mind-blowing. Think about the information tracked on our purchasing habits, driving records, browsing history, credit, and God knows what else. What about our dreams? Memories? Showers? What about the clouds? Earlier, on the runway, choosing not to put my phone on airplane mode because a pilot I once met told me it has zero effect on safety, a friend, not the one who keeps his receipts, texts me that he has just completed his most consecutive days alive and that tomorrow he will try to beat his current record. This is one of our jokes together. Another one of our jokes is that with everything we do, we exuberantly claim that the most direct route has been taken. In 2007, when we get lost trying to get to a party at a bar in Boston and drive circles around the city for 45 minutes, bopping our heads to “Hey There Delilah,” we affirm each other that we are taking the most direct route. Once we get to the party and it is the same old-same, we feel better that we have arrived and we are where we’re supposed to be, even though we leave within an hour because neither of us is particularly in our element at bars.
When my grandfather turns 100, he says he doesn’t think he will make it another 100 years. I laugh when he tells me this, but he was a government statistician and is without a sense of humor when it comes to anything quantitative. After his weekly Aldi shopping trip, he scrutinizes the receipt, adding each line as he goes, making sure the computer hasn’t made an arithmetic error. He doesn’t like talking on the phone long, so he thanks me for the birthday wishes and says he hopes it’s not too expensive, presuming it’s a long-distance call. My life partner laments her upcoming birthday because it's a big one. I predict she'll feel fine once the day has passed. Once the anticipation of the new number passes. It’s easier to be at the beginning of a decade than the end.
We wouldn't obsess over time without mortality. Millions have thought this same thought. Thousands have journaled it and surely dozens if not hundreds have published almost these exact words.
When talking about the future, my three-year-old often demands I tell her she’ll be a kid forever. I tell her she’ll be a kid for a very long time, and she retorts that she’ll be a kid for 89 years.
I catch myself telling people I’m a year older than I actually am. This is the desire to not lose time. It feels like a gain when you realize you get to go back, sort of like fall daylight savings. It’s not much but it’s not nothing.
Every time I come back to this document, my grandfather is older. He’s now 104. When I created this document, he was 102.
Growing up in St. Louis, my dad, a rheumatologist, would come home and I’d guess how many patients he saw that day. At Cardinals, games we’d run into multiple patients of his and I’d like to think about how many others might be in the 50,000 seat Busch stadium. I wished I could have walked around the entire stadium with my dad and determined the number of his patients there.
Keeping receipts, writing down dreams, logging everything you do is not OCD, or even extreme behavior—it's just what it takes to keep it all from vanishing in one freak fraction of a second.
Can anything that exists be counted? Kept track of? If something can be categorized as X, can it then be counted? Are small particles simply out of luck—will we ever know how much dust is in our house? How many deviant thoughts have crossed our minds? Google will always have our search history but who will keep track of our clipped toenails?
Over the phone, I’ve started to tell my friend who keeps receipts things that I hope to remember. I don’t have the discipline or energy to write everything down. I have too much of an aversion to clutter to keep receipts. I don’t tell him about my purchases. I slip into our conversations choice lines my daughter has said, knowing that he appreciates them and that he might remember them in twenty years. On our latest call, he asks me about my aunt who had recently passed away. The family theory was that her isolation during the lockdowns caused her severe depression, and she could no longer will herself to keep living. She was in good physical health and only 87. Not very old in my family, or at least not of passing age. She happened to be the keeper of family history. She knew the stories of my grandparents and great-grandparents. She had all the old family photos. I tear up while talking to my friend about her passing, mourning all that went with her, all that I’ll never be able to see or know. He tells me that he periodically does an exercise where he imagines the passing of everyone important in his life. It's a way of preparing himself for an inevitable version of the future. I tell him this has occurred to me too and that I have a therapist character in one of my short stories do this. The therapist character calls it Hypothetical-Catastrophe-Adjustment-Therapy.
My grandfather is now 105. When he finally passes, who will be able to conjure up a detail from his first forty years? Who will know what he had kept track of beyond his bills and grocery store receipts? Or maybe he’ll make it another 95 years, and who knows, perhaps by then everything will be able to be retrieved, or everything will be gone and no one burdened with all this want and worry.
Michael Don
Michael Don is the author of the story collection Partners and Strangers (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2019). His work has appeared in journals such as Washington Square Review, The Southampton Review, Fiction International and World Literature Today. He teaches at George Mason University and Co-edits Kikwetu: A Journal of East African Literature.