Time and Ice Cream

Time and Ice Cream

Memories from My Ice Cream Parlor

By Richard E. Noble

What is time?
A second, a minute, an hour, a day, a month, a year? Is this time?
No. These are all manmade measurements of the phenomena we call time. Time is that unexplainable lapse that occurs between two events. The pause that we experience between seeing a bolt of lightening in the sky and the thunder we hear later.
We measure time by an ancient method that all started by the notion of light and dark and day and night. The Indians had Moons; “It will be four moons before we meet again.”
A day depends upon the rotation of the earth on it axis, and a year is recorded as one complete flight of the planet earth around the sun. Is it the Earth rotating on it axis and its habit of traveling about the sun, that makes us grow older? If we could stop the earth in its tracks, and yet keep the Universe and the planet and our lives functioning, would the stopping of the movement of the planet stop our growth? Would we stop aging?
If we could counter the rotation of the earth and the speed of its orbit around the sun in some sort of simulator, could we then counter the process of aging? If not, what is aging?
If aging really has nothing to do with the motion of the planets or the stars, then what is it? Is it a metabolic thing? Is it a gravitational thing? Is it internal? Is it individual? Can it be controlled? Is it a dietary thing?
Is NOT growing old a possibility?
Can science one day discover what it is that deteriorates our organs and causes us to grow old? Could it one day be possible that Man would live a thousand of our years by taking some kind of pill or injecting some stimulant into a gland that would slow down the aging process and that a man of two hundred would only have the bodily wear and tare of a man of twenty?
If this science did become available would we all benefit from it, or only those who could afford it?
Is this science already available?
And keeping all of this in mind, could you tell me, did you ask for chocolate, or vanilla? And was that one scoop or two? You said a waffle cone didn’t you? Was that a twenty, or a ten?