Forever...and a Day

On our way to the schoolbus stop the other day, my daughter started arguing. Nothing new there. This kid would argue with her shadow, if that were possible.

There we are, heading for the corner on a pleasant spring morning, and she looks up at the robin's-egg sky and asks me how big the universe is. Out of the blue, so to speak. So I say It goes on forever, so she says But how big is it?, so I say You can't measure it, so she says You can measure everything, so I say Our brains aren't sophisticated enough to comprehend the concept of forever, there's no end to forever, so she says Everything ends sometime, so I say They have ways of studying these things, so she says Who are "they"?, so I say The cosmologists, so she says If I become a cosmologist, I'll prove there's an end to forever, so I say How about a cosmetologist, there's no end of them.

Just then the bus pulls up, ending our conversation.

By the time I walk in the back door, my head hurts. Nothing new there. My husband is sitting in the sun at the kitchen table drinking coffee (did I mention this was a pleasant spring morning?). I pour myself a jolt and join him. We stare, jointly, out into the backyard, where hummingbirds buzz the feeder ten days ahead of schedule and a pair of cherry trees in the "back forty" are exploding in delicate bloom. A herd of siskins is singing so loudly we can hear them inside the house.

I lower my coffee cup and turn to my husband and ask him to explain the universe. He reads National Geographic, he knows about these things. While I'm stuffing my head with People, my husband is boning up on The Singularity and the theory of Eternal Recurrence. Which, as I understand it, means just what its name implies: starting with the Big Bang, the universe continues to expand until reaching maximum expansion, at which point it begins to contract until reaching maximum contraction, which is followed by another Big Bang, and so on. The whole shebang keeps repeating itself, like some humongous rubberband, for eternity.

Which could explain alot.

For instance time travel, and worm holes, and where all those lost safety pins go. Or why I had major deja vu the first time I met my husband. I mean, I knew this guy, who I'd never laid eyes on, I fucking knew him. How was that possible? Perhaps because a certain configuration of our individual atoms co-existed during some lifetime a billion-trillion years ago, and now those particular individual configurations have "recurred," resulting in the recognition, the familiarity we felt from the beginning. This is big news for the soul-mate crowd. And what's a few quadrillion years in the grand scheme of things? We're talking eternity, pal.

I think of my husband as my soul-mate. He thinks of me as a problem to solve. Either way, our atoms sing to each other. Like siskins. Sometimes they sing so loudly, I can't hear myself think. I think this is the effect my husband is going for. (All this thinking...I need an aspirin.)

Here's what I really think: Joni Mitchell said it, we are stardust. Everything we're made of, every atom of our being, every atom of everything around us in the universe, was there at the beginning. And the beginning before that. And the beginning before that, and so on, and...Oh.My.God. An eternally-recurring series of beginnings must likewise be accompanied by an eternally-recurring series of endings, and when you look at it that way...My Daughter Is Right! There is an end to forever. In fact, an unending number of ends.

Unlike this post, which ends here.