The Magic Pause Button

Tara and her husband Todd take a walk through the county-owned woodland behind their home. Tara smiles. The land may belong to the county, but the joy belongs to Tara. She loves the woods. So does Todd. The woods are filled with trees and wildflowers, pebbles and boulders, streams and lily pads, frogs and birds, clouds and sunshine, all things loved by Tara, and Todd too.

“I love it,” Todd says.                                    

“What do you love?” asks Tara lazily, as she and Todd walk side by side along the dirt path that weaves through the acreage.

“The smile on your face. I love it. I am smiling too. We deserve to smile. Do you disagree?”

“No, I do not disagree.”

Todd is quite right, for he and Tara had spent many dark years in search of their smiles. They had weathered many personal storms, storms of sickness and money woes and family scars. Things had happened, as things can and do happen. But Tara and Todd always kept hope alive. They worked hard to bring light back into their lives. Their recent checkups at the doctor were exemplary, their bank account is once again solid, and everyone in the family is doing well. They even have plans to restore the in-ground pool that had come with the house, but which for the last twenty years has been in such disrepair. Oh, how their little granddaughter Lucille—Lulu—would love to swim in that pool.

Yes, the old scars have healed nicely. There are now so many plans to make, so much hope and optimism to cherish. So bright does the present seem and such encouragement does the future hold that Tara and Todd feel even better and stronger than they had before the dark years even began.

“It is such a glorious day, and the woods are so beautiful,” Tara says. “It feels wonderful. I wish there was a pause button so that this wonderful feeling can last forever. This feeling of calm. Of peace. The glorious day, the beautiful woods. Yes, we deserve our smiles, Todd. I wish we could hold onto our smiles hour after hour after hour.”

“We can,” Todd says swiftly.

Tara glances at her husband. Her eyebrows arch in delighted surprise.

“We can? You mean by the way we think?”

“No, no,” he explains. “Do you not remember? The man who sold us our house told us that there is a magic button deep in the woods. On a big tree. On the side of the trunk that cannot be seen from the dirt path. A magic pause button.”

“Oh yes—I do remember!” Tara recalls. “But he was such an odd little man. So very strange. I thought he was making it up. He seemed the type to tell tall tales.”

“So did I,” Todd admits. “At least, at first. But I spoke to him longer than you, and it very well may be, dear Tara, that he was telling the truth about the magic pause button.”

“Well,” says Tara, “shall we try to find it? Which tree do you suppose has the magic button?”

“The man said the tree with the button has two branches that cross each other, like someone making an X of their arms in front of them. Like this.” Todd demonstrates.

“Oh! I saw a tree like that around the bend! Way down there. Let us go and see if we can find it!”

So Tara and Todd turn around and stroll back from where they came, a two-minute walk during which they pass a babbling brook with shiny stones that reflect the sunlight peeking through the trees, and a little chipmunk that darts back and forth under a moss-covered trunk that had fallen down years ago after a storm. Tara loves seeing the brook and the stones and the chipmunk, and for a moment she forgets why they had turned back on the path. She is too entranced.

“Here it is,” Todd announces, bringing Tara out of her happy trance. “The tree. The branches that look like crossed arms. This is it. I will go behind to see if the button is there.”

“Be careful,” Tara warns.

Todd makes his way cautiously to the backside of the tree while Tara waits on the path.

“Do you see it? The magic pause button?” she asks excitedly.

“I do,” he acknowledges. “Yes. Here it is. It is pressed into the trunk, and it is very small. Shall I push it?”

“Do you think it will be all right to push it?”

“I can think of no reason why we should not push it. It seems safe enough. I see nothing about it that looks threatening. And that old man would never want to put us in harm’s way. He was very nice. Do you agree?”

“I agree.”

And with that, Todd lifts his right hand and presses the magic pause button.

Nothing happens.

“Do you think it worked?” Tara asks, somewhat giddily. “Nothing seems to have changed, although I suppose that if time is truly paused, nothing would change.”

Todd makes his way back to the path to stand beside his wife. “I suppose that’s true,” he says. “I suppose it might also be true that time has paused for no one but us!”

“I wonder if there will be any way to tell!” Tara asks. “I wonder if time has stopped for no one but us.”

“Maybe it is all about our point of view,” Todd offers. “Maybe that strange little old man was a philosopher of some kind. Maybe he meant that pausing time is an affair of the mind, connected to our attitudes. I really do not know, Tara. What do you think?”

Tara breathes in deeply and smells the sweetness of the air. She notices tiny blue wildflowers that she had not seen before. She looks straight up through a break in the trees and sees puffy white clouds, and one of the clouds looks like a bunny rabbit, and that makes her smile even more, for she loves bunny rabbits. She loves to see all the animals in the woods run around, and she loves to see birds fly free in the sky. “Nothing should ever be caged,” Tara had said many times in the past, and Todd hears her say it in his head just then, even though the words do not come out of her mouth. He simply knows what she must be thinking when she looks at a cloud that is in the shape of a bunny rabbit. That is how intimate Todd is with his wife’s minds and with her thoughts.

“What do I think? I think it worked,” Tara smiles, in answer to the question Todd had posed a moment before, just as she had gazed at the wildflowers and the puffy white clouds. “How could it not have worked, with all the beauty I see, and with the marvelous way I feel? Let us walk some more, Todd. Let us keep walking, as far as we can go. Farther than we have ever gone before. If the pause button is real, then we’ll have nothing but happiness as we walk. We will simply make sure to be home by dinnertime, for Ben and Sophie and Lulu will at our house at six for the birthday party. Our little Lulu’s birthday party. We have plenty of time.”

“Can you believe that Lulu is turning four years old?” Todd observes.

“Four years! And I have only just begun to teach her all the important things in life!”

Todd chuckles.

“Okay—Professor Grandma!” Todd jests. He wishes not to joke too much, however. There is still a bit of sensitivity about the visits of Ben and Sophie and Lulu, simply because their son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter live so far away and are unable to visit as often as Tara and Todd would like them to. It often makes them sad to see Lulu so infrequently, even though Ben cherishes his childhood home. “Oh, how I would love to move back into this house one day,” Ben had said one day during a recent visit, and the memory of that remark makes Tara chuckle with simple, harmless pride. “How I would love, too, for my own children to move into this house one day,” Ben further reflected during that same visit. The memory of her son’s words make Tara smile. Instinctively, Todd knows why she is smiling.

“Anyway,” Tara says, returning to the here and now and the thoughts of the birthday party, “all the food is prepared, and the cake has been made, and Lulu’s present is next to the piano, and so everything is set. There is nothing more to do. Let us take pleasure in this pause while we can.”

Todd enjoys the phrase Tara had just employed, ‘Let us take pleasure in this pause,’ and so he repeats it, and then Tara repeats it once again, and after both have repeated it—each one twice more—they continue to walk along the path to relish in the sights and sounds and scents of the woods, and they comment on what they see and hear and smell, and they both are still very happy. 

When finally they come to the edge of the woods, close to where their own backyard begins, they stop and stare because the built-in pool, they notice, the one that had been in such disrepair, is no longer there. Ancient bricks, chipped and faded, still surround the oval where the pool once had been. But rocky dirt and grubby patches of lawn now fill the oval, and within that rocky, patchy oval are three tall poles that stick straight up into the air. And at the top of each pole are wire cages, and in the cages are birds that are able to fly only the length and width of the small cages. The birds in those cages are able to sing songs that sound far too abrupt to be true birdsongs.  

“What is all this?” Tara asks, a look of unease on her face. Tara looks at Todd, and Todd looks at Tara. Both know that the sole question to be asked and somehow answered is at once simple and bizarre, and that question is, How can a built-in pool disappear and dreadful bird cages on tall poles appear in its place all in the amount of the time it takes to walk a mile or so in the woods?

Todd stares at the back of the house. What had once been a beautiful glass slider is now a chipped wooden door.  

“The house…” he says—but leaves the rest of the sentence unfinished.

On the patio is a lounge chair, and on the lounge chair sits an old woman. Will she know what happened? Should they ask? This is what Tara and Todd both wonder silently, instinctively aware that one has the same thought as the other. Then, out of the wooden door come two people, a man and a child. The man holds the child’s hand.

“Could that little child be Lulu?” Tara asks. She forgets for the moment about the pool and the poles and the cages and the door and all else that had been muddling through her mind. “Can that be our son Ben and his wife Sophie, even though look so very different? Maybe my eyes are just tired.” For a moment, Tara has a wisp of hope.

The toddler lets go of the man’s hand and runs over to the old woman on the lounge chair. As she runs the toddler shouts happily, “Grandma Lulu, Grandma Lulu, can I sit on your lap?”

Tara looks once again at Todd, and he at her, and both understand instantly. Despite their good health and hope for the future, their smiles disappear.