Time

       Salvador Dali's famous surrealist painting, The Persistence of Memory, shows clocks melting across an arid landscape.

      The softening pocket watches are said to depict the passage of time in dreams, or time's irrelevance.  I used to like to think the painting showed the way the pain of loss, embarrassment and cruelties of the past fade with the haze of distance, allowing us to look back without hurt.  The work was titled The Persistence of Memory, after all.
       Now I recognize the distortion aspect better. When we are young, time stretches before us, endlessly.  Christmas or that trip to Disneyland may only be a week away, but the moment takes eons to arrive.  As we age, time flips by. A year zips past with the speed of a dragonfly.
       After a spate in which I had lots of time on my hands, I will return to work--and have none. During the last months, time melted and dripped all over the place, and still,  there was quite often never enough of it. Procrastination became a fine art, a piece of work worthy of a frame in the Museum of Modern Art. And then...it was gone.
       Now, instead of dripping from rocks and barren trees, time will be gobbled by PacMan.

        I gave myself a week to prepare. That's half gone already and the rest of the week is filled with engagements and commitments that will not allow me to loaf around, finishing up things I wanted to do. Or just wrapping my ahead around the  concept of having to set the alarm clock each day.
      Years later, after the dropping of the first atomic bomb, Dali revisited his theme in The Disintegration of Persistence of Memory, exploding the barren landscape along with the melting watches.

             Time doesn't really explode, though. It doesn't march on. It melts, no matter how much or how little we have of it.