The Age of Mammals
One evening a few years ago Joe and I were walking the dog by the creek near our house when a thought out of nowhere appeared in my head: This is the before time. It must have been around this time of year, just post time-change, because recently something about the late-afternoon light has been reminding me of that moment, all the new leaves glowing green in the setting sun. We didn’t live in this house in very early spring 2015 so it was very early spring 2016, no later, because I remember remembering that thought over and over again that year and in the years that followed, each new catastrophe, real or imagined, just another confirmation that I was right, I was right, I was right.
Well, of course I was right. Time was always going to pass. It perhaps could have passed less eventfully, could have done me myself and the world at large a little bit less dirty in the process, but the general conditions were always fungible. There was always going to be some morning I woke up and looked around and realized things were no longer what or where they used to be, that I wasn’t who I used to be. I knew this, because I’ve lived in time my whole entire life. And yet I forgot. I forget!
Lately I’ve been thinking about time and its various containers, the official ones and the others more obscure, and how mostly we are fumbling around the junk piles of our lives, but sometimes, if we frame it just right, the old boot, the broken wiffle ball, and the hamster wheel become a perfectly-timed Rube Goldberg machine, one part kicking neatly into the next — a story, or the sense of a story. The way pregnancy gets counted in months or weeks or weeks and days; the way a baby is days old, then weeks old, then months, then years, the tipping point from one unit to the next unspoken but obvious when ignored. My own baby has been here for five months now, and somehow I know not to say she’s twenty-one weeks, just like I know my father, freshly seventy, isn’t an 840-month-old. Geologically, years become ages become epochs become periods become eras become eons, and a certain number of eons make a super-eon, but only once so far. So here we are in the Meghalayan age of the Holocene epoch of the Quaternary period of the Cenozoic era of the Phanerozoic eon, although whether we’re in a new epoch, actually — the Anthropocene, Greek for “y’all done fucked this place up” — is a matter of debate among the organizations that exist to debate these things, which reminds me of when I recently referred to Valentine’s Day as a made-up holiday and Joe said, “Babe, all holidays are made up.” It’s all made up! I forget that too.
This month makes three years since the pandemic got real in the U.S., and though I do love an anniversary as another way to force a narrative, maybe too much, this one has big junk pile energy for me. I can’t make any sense of it at this remove — too much has changed, or not enough has changed. I prefer to note my life’s new personal timescale, which is Times Before, During, and Between Watching and Rewatching The Sopranos, which at this point I assume I will be doing on and off for the rest of my life. Time Before: November 1984 through spring 2020, the years of darkness. Spring through summer 2020: the great awakening. Summer 2020 through fall 2022: the time of many questions and, shockingly, some answers. Fall 2022 through winter 2023: Joe’s sixth (seventh?) watch, my second, and the baby’s… well, not “first” exactly, but let’s give her some points for being generally around and highly impressionable. I think of what changed in our lives between watching the first and last episodes in 2020, and it’s nothing, really; the days were longer and we’d given up Clorox wiping our groceries? But between first and last this time around we seemed to live a whole lifetime per season. This time, when we started, the baby was twenty days old, oblivious of day versus night, Joe was giving her all of her bottles, I was pumping my brains out, we were shattered and ecstatic; by season three, she had figured out what a boob was for and demanded to be attached to one every night between 7 and 11 o’clock; by season four, she was making the same demand but with an unsettling attraction to the action on screen, so we took a break for a while, and just like… sat there?; then by season six she’d settled on a more respectable 6 pm bedtime, leaving Joe and I to watch all by our lonesome as she dreamed of milk and gabagool.
Funny enough, a couple weeks ago we watched the series finale the same day another personal era came to a close — the day I quit my job. I worked at Mailchimp for nine years, since March 2014, over half my adult life. In that time, I entered and moved through most of my thirties, wrecked and bought a car, bought a house, wrote nine drafts of a book, lost my three remaining grandparents, got pregnant five times, had one baby. A whole pandemic, or the whole of the pandemic so far. All but four days of our dog’s life with us happened in those nine years. Plus all the other things that make a day, a week, a month, however many times over. So much time, so many befores and afters, and there will be more — there are always more — but these will belong to a new era, one of me being an unemployed person who writes and hangs out with a baby and figures of what she wants to do next, one that doesn’t have a name yet, it’s just glowing green in the setting sun.
Thanks for reading Vanitas, a newsletter about life, death, and other dumb stuff. If you’d like, follow me on Instagram: @by_rachaelmaddux.
The painting is The Dove, Nr 12 by Hilma af Klint.