JURASSIC REVISITED a short story

Susan unlocked the door and stooped as she entered to avoid hitting her head. At seven feet, she was nick-named “shorty” for she was the shortest person in her group. She felt secure here and was glad that they had chosen this house with its high ceilings and robust construction. She placed her basket on the floor and called, “I’m home” as she removed her hat and outer clothing, which completely cocooned her and shielded her from the sun’s UV rays. Then she took up her basket and made her way to the kitchen where she placed the basket containing three large eggs that she had found on the counter. She thought that they were chicken eggs, but it was hard to tell as chickens were now the size of ostriches, and their large eggs could be confused with those of the larger reptiles roaming the land. Her spoils unloaded; Susan hurried into the main room to join the other five residents of the house sitting in a circle before a crackling radio.

“Did I miss anything?” she asked.

“They just announced that this is to be the last transmission.”

“So why the silence, surely there is no-one to put on commercials?”

“Something happened!”

Susan reached over and gently twiddled the knob. The radio emitted static and then they heard a voice,

“Today is momentous because it is the fiftieth anniversary of the first sun spot emitting X2X as observed by University of Texas astrology student Tony Clearwell. It is also to be the day of our last transmission. We ask that you copy and save this record for the future. We hope that one such copy will be found, possibly even a million years henceforth, a mere ripple in the 4.5 million years of the earth’s existence. It will help to explain the demise of our failed humanoid culture.”

While the transmission droned on with statistics, facts and figures to be saved for the future, Susan let her mind wander. She remembered her grandmother reminiscing, about Tony Clearwell, in her faint old voice. The matriarch told about the ridicule that his first observations had received. She spoke of the acceleration of global warming and the rising of the seas. She ridiculed the 2019 prediction by some of the collapse of humanity within a decade. She always concluded with a comment that farmers were the first to observe the curiosity that all living things were getting bigger. Susan remembered her happiness in the thought, which she took to her grave, that global warming was a blessing.

Susan remembered that her mother shared this belief until it became obvious that things were not OK. She told her daughter,

“At first scientists explained the unnatural growth as being a positive result of   global warming with its prolonged warmer growing seasons and increased rainfall. The unprecedented growth of all living things, exposed to sunlight, including humans, quickly became problematic and stimulated scientists to look twice. We now know that Tony Clearwell’s X2X, a previously undiscovered UV ray, promotes rapid, almost uncontrolled growth in both flora and fauna. Scientists suggest that this X2X UV light is what created the Jurassic age, and killed the dinosaur age when transmission ceased.”

Susan sighed as she thought about the accelerated Darwinian way that dramatically enlarged reptiles, insects and the general spectrum of fauna were adapting to their enlarged bodies and the rapidly growing flora. No one had yet seen a facsimile of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but she imagined that it was just a question of time.

Time honored memories – a poem

A couple of years ago Dan and I studied Eliot’s “The Four Quartets”. I emerged with a sense of wonder at his genius, even if normal persons, such as I, have a hard time comprehending his innuendo and references. He often focuses on time which inspired me to wait a while and then to put my thoughts on the same topic into a poem. I hope that it also gets you thinking.

Time present does not exist.
In the blink of a nano second,
It slips through the veil of now,
To be lost in the past.
In its passage it leaves
No tag, no taste, no touch,
No smell, no color, no light,
Nothing, except perchance, a memory.

The future we live,
And relive. Plan and seek,
It does not exist. It is
A figment of our expectation
To lurk forever undefined
It fills us with hopes, fears, excitement,
Anticipation, but no regrets for
Regrets are the stamp of the past

The past is select iotas of time.
To live, and relive. A few moments,
Kept in our temporal minds.
Not held for eternity,
Fleetingly resurfacing in our present,
Here lurk our regrets and sorrows
Mingled with joys and pleasures,
All lost, perhaps, when we die.

Some past chose us
Lee Harvey Oswald kills JFK
And the world acquires a memory
That individual moment when the shots rang
Yuri Gagarin, man in Space, whirls weightless,
Man’s “one small step” indelible on
World vision, Neil Armstrong takes his “giant leap”
Planet and moon one in time.

Other remnants of individual past
Horded, nourished, retrieved
Slip, invited, or not,
Into the mind’s present.
A marriage, a trip, a view,
A regrettable mistake,
Chocolate birthday cake
And Proust’s petit Madeleine.

Fifty years ago I selected
An obscure moment
To remember for eternity
Walking an ugly lane
I said “this moment is worthless
And yet, I choose to remember it”
Undistinguished, cherished
Thrust out of that present into the future,

And recall I still do:
The dirty ground, the ruts and stones,
The grey sky, the high hedges, the cold spring air,
My satchel, my isolation,
My knowledge that this moment,
Is a piece of the past,
My unimportant snippet of time,
Only, and always, mine.