Flying with Sandy
With the day-after gusts and drizzle, no power for TV, and an Executive Order outlawing Halloween for New Jersey kids in the wake of the “Frankenstorm”, I was able to convince my younger daughter to take a walk with Duke (the dog) and me to see if the playground had reopened.
It hadn’t, but a bunch of kids were on the corner, and Breena asked please, please, please can she hang out with them. I said yes, as long as she didn’t leave the corner for any reason other than to walk home.
This is a story about time, which, it seems, is what my blog is about. More specifically, it’s about time interrupted: its tricks and treats. Disaster, like a sabbatical on steroids, refocuses our relationship with time by disturbing the normal course of events. Things like elementary schools and lights stop all together, others like buying gas or getting to work take forever, and the priorities of our days are reshuffled like a deck or toppled like a house of cards.
The screenplay I’ve been trying to write for the past six months is about a disaster involving the national power grid, but one caused by a terrorist cyber worm rather than natural causes like winds and floods. I haven’t gotten past the outline stage, because my readers keep getting confused by the 40-year time sequence. I finally got it right, I think, after following the advice of my screenwriting buddy in LA, by creating a temporal “anchor” in the year 2037. That's when there is an assassination attempt on the life of U.S. President Jason Martinez. I emailed my rewrite a month after his comments, which was Monday morning, the day Sandy came to town.
The next day, I drove around looking unsuccessfully for gas—actually, really just so Emma could charge her iPhone—and returned to find the kids from the corner in my driveway without Breena. They said she had gone to another kid’s house, in direct violation of my only rule. Then, like water finally breaching the sandbags, they really spilled the beans: Breena had been stealing my money to buy weed at the playground, as well as pizza and other stuff, most of which she gave away to her new-found friends.
Dr. Russell Barkley, one of the world’s leading experts on ADHD, says the disorder is not so much about inattentiveness, but rather a kind of “time blindness” or “nearsighted[ness] when it comes to time.” People with ADHD don’t have a normal “sense of self across time.” Maybe you could say the same things about all teenagers, but as a parent of a kid with ADHD, it’s clearly different, though also not clear at all what it is or what to do about it.
There are only three parts to time: past, present, and future. All the spiritual stuff I’ve been exposed to on my sabbatical tells me to reorient my attention to the present. Just breathe. Almost like intentional ADHD. Oblivious to consequences, Breena lives in the present, like a bird with eyes darting from one worm to the next. When Emma gets caught, she will deny her involvement for days; Breena, in contrast, fesses up immediately. She even feels sorry, but cannot articulate why. So there is little need for denial.
During this Presidential campaign, there has been no mention so far of climate change, even though the predictions of increasing frequency of extreme weather events have already painfully come true. Would greater political “presence” mean less denial or more inattentiveness to consequence?
I think I am now going to bicycle to Hoboken to volunteer my time. Unless I get distracted with some other flight of fancy.
