An impossible snapshot of a fleeting, meaningless moment

When I retired from 34 years of teaching and coaching, I spent my last few days walking around the school, saying goodbye to all that I would miss.

I started, of course, by saying goodbye to colleagues — teachers, secretaries, custodians, counselors, and even a few administrators — but then I bid farewell to the places and things I would miss.

One of them was the coaches’ locker room, where I had spent countless hours before school, after school, and on weekends. On my last day in that room, I sat on the wooden bench and I said to nobody in particular, “Man, I’m going to miss these footprints.”

Bill, the varsity track and cross-country coach, said, “Why? Don’t you make footprints when you walk out of the shower at home?”

“No, not our wet footprints,” I said. “These footprints.” I pointed down at the cement between my feet, and Bill came over to look.

“Cat prints?!?” he said. “How long have those been there?”

“I’m guessing since the cement was wet 40 years ago,” I said. “Unless somebody brought a really heavy cat to work recently. You never noticed them?”

He hadn’t. I asked a few other coaches, and none of them had noticed the prints either, which had been in plain view every day for decades.

The prints were very faint, so I guess my fellow coaches can be forgiven for not seeing them. Anyone taking note of them would have to be a dedicated down-looker, which I guess I am.

Pretty much everybody I’ve ever traveled with has noticed that trait about me. While others snap photos of red Sedona mountains, or craggy Irish castles, or columbine-blue Icelandic hills, I’m picking up that sparkly granite pebble, or gray flake of slate, or bit of volcanic lava to take home with me. My bookshelves are filled with them, edging aside the few books I have kept to reread.

Each holds a special place in my heart, with a discovery story I can tell if you have enough extra minutes in your day that you’re willing to spend listening to a dedicated down-looker prattle on about it.

But the stars of my collection are the fossils, some of them 300 million years old, gathered from nearby places like Wilmington and Braidwood, where coal strip-miners a century ago left them scattered across the landscape. My largest is a petrified tree stump in my garden, two feet high and more than a foot thick, weighing over a hundred pounds. (If you’re willing to spend a few of those extra minutes, I can tell you how I almost sank my kayak retrieving it from a strip-mine lake where I used to own a shoreline cabin long ago.)

My bookshelf fossils, of course, are much smaller—a leaf no longer than your finger, or a tiny invertebrate sea creature no bigger than your thumbnail.

And what appeals to me about them is the virtual impossibility that they even exist.

After all, what is the life expectancy of a single leaf? How many leaves rustle on a single tree? How many leafy trees stand in a forest in a single growing season?

And how many leaves have fallen and decomposed from how many trees from how many growing seasons over the past 300 million years?

And yet this one — THIS ONE — somehow survived to end up on my bookshelf. Its few frail months of life on this planet came and went in a flash, and yet this leaf persists over eons stretching 300 million years and more, like an impossible snapshot of a fleeting meaningless moment.

Countless leaves from countless trees over countless years have come and gone without a trace, and yet this one somehow found an eternal way to tell the future that it was briefly here.

Like that long-gone cat that spent a few seconds of its brief life strolling across wet cement. Had it walked past an hour earlier — or later — the future would never have known that it ever existed.

An impossible snapshot of a fleeting meaningless moment.

I have not been back to that coaches’ locker room for years, but a walk in my neighborhood this morning brought it back to mind and launched this whole narrative about felines and fossils and other foolishness.

Right around the corner from my house, a line of ill-advised trees were planted 20 years ago, some kind of fast-growing elm tree with thick, shallow, invasive roots. And because these trees were planted in the easement only a few feet from the sidewalk, that cement has been buckled and cracked and repaired several times over the past few years.

The most recent repairs happened a couple weeks ago, so that stretch of sidewalk had been closed to me while the work was being done. But it’s open now, so this morning I was able to return to my regular walking path.

And there on three sections of new cement are the footprints of birds — probably grackles — fossilized into futurity. And because the tree root problem was also addressed in a more permanent way, that stretch of sidewalk should be fine for decades to come.

That means that long after those grackles—and I—have passed into history, future dedicated down-lookers will be able to smile at that impossible snapshot of a fleeting meaningless moment that came — and went — just a few weeks ago in my time, and who knows how long ago in theirs.

But if you’re not a walker or dedicated down-looker, I’ll keep you posted of such things in my column, which is itself a sort of album of fleeting meaningless moments.

And which, thanks to the Internet, will likely be petrified for far-future descendants to discover.

TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com

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