Killing Time

Since he retired back in February, Jeremy had a lot of time to kill. Like most retiree rookies, he vowed to exercise more. He started watching yoga videos on YouTube. He began walking the beach near his home. Huffing down the beach and back would help burn calories and keep him occupied until happy hour, he figured.

As he settled into his near-daily routine of strolling the shore, Jeremy started recognizing the same characters along the way. One regular was an attractive older woman who always wore a bikini no matter the weather. She had a melanoma-level tan, punctuated with peroxide-perfect shoulder-length hair. The woman was always barefoot, and she appeared nearly every time Jeremy was out. Like clockwork.

Lifeguards, too, became familiar fixtures on the sand. Most were buffed-out young men in their early twenties, he guessed, but he had lost his ability to judge age once he hit his fifties. The lifeguards would slowly patrol the beach in their fire engine-red JEEPs outfitted with the tools to save a drowning soul in those precious first minutes. The young lifeguard acknowledged Jeremy with a wave, and he eagerly responded in kind.

Jeremy began taking a dog poop bag on his walks to pick up trash that had washed ashore. The low tide left it all stranded: caps from water bottles, snack wrappers, plastic spoons, toothbrushes, straws, and even the occasional flip-flop or baseball hat—thrashed apart by its violent time at sea. Jeremy found that low tide also created the best walking conditions, so he downloaded a tides app on his phone to track them. He became fascinated by the graphic bell curves charting the rise and fall of the mighty ocean. Never-ending. Day after day. Hour after hour.

This particular day brought about the lowest tide he had ever witnessed. He walked down to the waterline and was strangely transfixed. He watched the glassy swells rise and curl over, crashing into white foamy chaos. Jeremy closed his eyes to focus on the fear-inducing roar of the waves in his ears. He took a deep breath of salty air and let out an open-mouth exhale. “Namaste!” he yelled to the universe.

Jeremy turned to retrace his path back to the pier. The lifeguard was still idling in his JEEP in the exact spot he passed nearly an hour ago. The lifeguard waved out of the open-sided vehicle. “That’s odd,” Jeremy thought, “I just saw the kid. Maybe he didn’t recognize me.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he detected the tanned bikini lady walking her identical route toward him, oblivious to the strange sensation that had overtaken Jeremy. What was going on? 

Eyeing the large clock on the lifeguard headquarters building, Jeremy was stunned to see that the clock was still displaying 1:15—the time he had set out nearly two hours ago!

Sure, retirement had caused some days to blur together, he thought, but this was something else. Jeremy had smoked a lot of pot in his younger years. Could he be having a flashback? He was scared and thrilled at the same time.

Jeremy began to wonder if his meditation at the water’s edge had unleased some sort of cosmic time bend. He tried to recall Einstein’s theory of relativity. Distances in space and time are relative. They change depending on how fast you’re moving. They pass at different rates for different people blah blah blah. He had no idea how to even wrap his head around it. Jeremy was never any good at physics. Did he just fall into a fucking wormhole or something? Nobody else seemed to be running around in a panic that their watches and phones stopped moving forward. The ocean just continued with its rhythmic pulse like a metronome. 

The next day at low tide (3:41 p.m.) Jeremy returned to the scene of the crime, just past lifeguard station number five. He brought his phone this time to prove his theory.

Facing the water, Jeremy closed his eyes, took another deep breath of sea air, and exhaled, proclaiming “Namaste!” to the waves. He began walking back toward his car, taking out his phone after several minutes. 3:41. As soon as he stepped off the beach and back onto the pavement, his phone’s clock started ticking forward again. Was the sand acting as the proverbial sand in an hourglass? Was low tide possibly the skinny part of that hourglass, stopping up the space-time continuum like a cork?

Jeremy returned the following day at the time when the tide would be highest. He again walked down to the water and conjured up his mystical trance. “Namaste!” he yelled like the previous two days. He pulled out his iPhone. The clock kept ticking.

So, what if it was the low tide that paused time, Jeremy wondered. What would he do with the information? Could he make a killing in stocks? Doubt it. Stop the aging process? Standing on the beach would only increase the aging process with the constant sun exposure, he reasoned. Just look at the tan lady. (Speaking of which, was she in on the secret?). Eventually, time would have to march forward so he could use the bathroom after standing there. Or would time pause his bladder too? His head was about to explode.

He decided that for such a cool parlor trick of stopping time (he did plan on bringing his wife down to show her—when she had the time, Ba Dum CHING!) it didn’t have any practical use. Who really wants to live forever?  

When Jeremy first retired, he sat down and wrote a list of goals to accomplish and new hobbies to learn. Travel more. Make new friends. Worry less. Volunteer. Lose weight. Pick the guitar back up. Maybe learn how to surf. The usual. Yet while simply trying to kill time, Jeremy discovered a way to actually pause it, at least for a while. 

“Way to go, Einstein,” he laughed to himself. “Not bad for retired old guy.”