Escape velocity

One cliched but ubiquitous sign of aging is the sense that time is speeding up. We round a bend in the road and see a speck on the horizon that we know is where a long and uncertain journey will end, or can end, perhaps even without incident, and it’s only natural that we pick up the pace a bit. Or perhaps the medium we travel through begins to contract, causing each step to count for two, then three, then four. One way or the other, we achieve escape velocity.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to last night’s edition of Tim’s Nightly Transportation Nightmare. This one involved a city bus and a little girl. We were long-time traveling companions, drifters, but I realized as we stepped off the bus that I’d left something behind, and when the girl reboarded to get it for me, the bus took off with her inside. I spent the rest of the dream trying to find the bus, find her, having no idea where I was, unable to figure out how to use my phone. It occurred to me in the dream that I should have trained the girl for this contingency, should have told her to tell the driver to stop immediately because I’d forgotten to take with me some essential medicine – insulin, maybe, or heart attack pills – without which I would die. Useless hindsight, though. On foot, with an undecipherable phone in an unfamiliar city, I’d never find the bus.