The Goddess Speaks
The Goddess Speaks
WHO says a time machine does not exist? While I wait in line at my post office, I study my unstamped letters, my fingernails, my shoes, other people's shoes, anything to avoid looking at the neon demon blinking at me, on, off, on, off, not 3 feet away. In mourning for a
century I call my ownDay-Glo numerals, centerpiece of a poster extolling the stamp collection of the century, count down the days, hours, minutes and, heaven help me, milliseconds remaining until midnight of the last day of 1999.
Before my eyes this techno-tyrant is flinging away the final moments of my millennium, my century. I have the sense of being in a boat without a paddle rushing downstream, no chance to wave farewell.
Other customers chat, look bored or doze on their feet, shoulders tilting against white plaster walls. They might argue that the moment one unit of time displaces another is a mere mark on the calendar, a notion dreamed up by mankind, nothing anyone can touch, see or feel. I look back and see, stretching across the millennium, a chain of events that changed our world, another thousand-year chapter about to make way for the next.
But it is these last hundred years that are personally mine. The 20th century is my home. Going on to the next hundred years is like leaving the place where I grew up. I try to imagine how it will be when I can no longer say, "in this century ...," referring to the days, hours and minutes that shaped me.
I am my parents' shock over the black man in my wedding party, my babies arriving by natural childbirth, divorce in Mexico. In joy and, sometimes, sorrow, I am opera at the old Met, the circus at Madison Square Garden, Montessori, integrated public school, fledgling discos in Provincetown, homeopathy and Buddhist monks in Woodstock, nursing and AIDS in San Francisco, the phenomenon of growing old.
AS the door into the year 2000 swings open, I see myself stepping into a science-fiction world. Sauntering about, faking it like a new kid in school, I will be an outcast staggered by tourists on the moon, robots in the kitchen, cloned vegetables and children, cities under plastic domes.
Like a passenger in a car shimmering with the latest technology, barreling across a brand new landscape, I will have zoomed over the crest of a hill, the world I loved and knew gone forever on the other side.
With everyone everywhere caught up by the melodrama of Y2K, the planning of spectacular parties and whether to hold them in the Australian outback or on an ice floe at the North Pole, I may be the only one in mourning.
I used to hide out in the bathroom at New Year's Eve parties when horns started blaring and people began planting drunken kisses on strangers. Sitting on a furry bathmat draped over the edge of someone's tub, I ruminated over the outbound 12 months, drank a toast to the year newly born.
For the upcoming departure of our own special 20th century I would like a great New Orleans funeral, a huge parade of everyone who lived during these past hundred years, those famous throughout the world and those famous among their own circle of friends: Louis Armstrong, FDR, Diego Rivera. Your best friend from kindergarten, your great aunt, the person you hardly knew who inspired you to believe in yourself. You name them, they would be there, blowing on trombones and trumpets, marching across the great divide, singing "Forward! And remember!"
Cecilia Worth is a free-lance writer of nonfiction.
She is working on two books of memoirs.
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