#5 Remember in the future

Talking about time with a four-year-old

Dear friends,

My four-year-old son is in a big questioning phase, coming out with questions so bizarre and gnomic they could be mistaken for koans:

            We can’t see the wind. Can the wind see itself?

            How did scientists discover persons?

            Can you whisper in your own ear?

            If gravity was a person, would it walk somewhere else?  

            Can my voice get a voice that isn’t its voice?

My favourites are his questions about time. He doesn’t seem to have gathered that time is unidirectional and he sometimes asks whether the things that are happening have already happened and are now happening again. Not versions of those things, but those precise moments. A few days ago he was getting ready for school when he said, ‘This morning feels familiar…’ and looked around suspiciously, as though he was being duped into reliving a day that had already been. In my son’s mind, for now at least, time can loop and slip and recur.

‘Do you remember in the future?’ he asked me recently. I had to admit that I don’t.  

We talked a lot about time last weekend, when we went to the mountains for a night away. The conversation started at the Bee & Embroidery Museum, which my wife had suggested we visit because it was near to the place we were staying. I had my doubts about the museum but I agreed, thinking our children would at least enjoy the bees.

We followed a twisting road up the side of one valley and down into the next. The museum was in the house of a Cypriot couple in their seventies, at the centre of a small mountain village. A sign outside for ‘Visitor Parking’ pointed to the single space on their front drive. We were met in a rambling kitchen garden by a glamorous older woman in a black and white polka dot dress, who told us she had lived in the village her whole life. She guided us through a series of preserved rooms, where the implements and ornaments of her childhood were presented as relics of a far-off age.

As predicted, the bee-focused exhibits went down best with our children: the terracotta pipes that were once used as beehives; the crusty chunks of old honeycomb; the cast-iron tub with a crank handle, which the woman had used, as a child, to spin the honey off the combs.

The exhibition felt less like a museum than a time warp, a piece of the past carried into the present. In the garden afterwards the woman’s husband brought us freshly picked pomegranates, tomatoes grown from ancient seeds and droopy purple mulberries. While we ate them, I tried to explain to my son and daughter that the items in the museum were not actually very old, it was just that the world had changed a lot since the woman’s childhood. It had changed a lot since my childhood too, I said, and was changing now faster than ever.

It’s a lot for a four and a six-year-old to process. At that age time moves slowly and everything seems a long time ago. It’s hard to distinguish between decades and centuries, millennia and epochs. By contrast, I’m finding that a curious paradox of adulthood is the way that, as I get older, the remote past feels nearer. There’s a kind of concertina effect, the past opening up the further I pull away from it.

Later that day we went to another local attraction, about which I also had doubts: Golden Donkeys, the largest donkey park in Cyprus. My doubts proved to be unfounded: Golden Donkeys delivers everything you might hope for from a donkey park. Our children fed donkeys and stroked donkeys. They rode donkeys called Casanova and Rasputin. They ate homemade donkey milk chocolate and donkey milk ice cream.

The aim of the donkey park, we learned, is to ‘make donkeys important in the life of Cyprus again’, to recover the strong bond between people and animals that the donkey represents. We looked at black and white photos of donkeys carrying hay bales and baskets of olives along steep dirt tracks. They were taken just a few decades ago, but I struggled to connect them to this place, right now.

While we bounced from one donkey experience to the next, we came across a 1500-year-old olive tree, a hollow giant, riddled with an elaborate lacework of holes, but still thriving and fruiting. We went to stand in the tree’s shade and inspect its huge shaggy crown. The new branches looked absurd sprouting from the ravaged trunk: extreme youth and extreme age, strangely conjoined.

In a country covered in new build houses and hotels, old trees like this have a certain cachet. Centuries-old olive trees change hands for thousands of Euros on the Cypriot equivalent of e-bay (‘Condition: Used’). People buy them and replant them outside their white concrete boxes, to give their properties a more settled, sophisticated feel. I tried to explain to my children that this tree was fabulously old and had watched empires rise and fall before finding itself in a corner of Cyprus’s largest donkey park.

We continued talking about time when we got to the hotel. We looked at the mountains from our balcony, their sides rucked and rippled like liquid frozen mid-flow, and discussed how they had got there. Cyprus is on a fault line and this range is a vast wedge of oceanic crust forced upwards, over millions of years, from the bottom of the sea to ear-popping heights.

When it got dark, we looked at the stars and the quick, insistent satellites moving among them. My wife and I tried to explain that satellites are close to the earth and have only just been put there, whereas stars are ancient and impossibly far away.

It’s easy to say these things, but harder to process and feel them. I was not sure what my children were taking in. Satellites are near; stars are far. A mountain is older than a tree which is older than a terracotta beehive. The scales kept sliding and it was difficult to keep anything in perspective.

One of the strangest things I find about being a parent is living with people whose experience of time and space is so different to your own. I could see my son trying to get his head round it all.

‘Will we have this moment again?’ he asked. ‘Will we have this moment again?’

Warm wishes,

Matt