Tomorrow is such a long time ~ October 5, 1989

David Heiller

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death...

Macbeth spoke those words at the end of a bitter life of power and betrayal. And now they are coming back to haunt me through the words of my four-year-old daughter.

Mollie hasn’t started reading Shakespeare yet. She’s not even reading Olga Da Polga, although she listens to Cindy read it every night at bedtime.

But on the subject of “tomorrow”, she can keep up with Bill Shakespeare just fine, thank you.

It usually starts the previous night, when we are saying goodnight, lying in her bed. Mollie starts by seeking promises.

“Can I wear my heart dress tomorrow?” she’ll ask.

“Uh-huh,” I’ll answer in a dull voice. Mollie has a way of wearing your voice down to a dull edge by seven in the evening.

If it is real dull, she’ll move boldly on: “Can I go to Day Care tomorrow?” Uh-huh. “Can I stay at Bobby-Jo’s house tomorrow?” Uh-huh. “Can I have the keys to the car tomorrow?” Uh-huh.

Then the next day she calls us due: “Is it tomorrow?” she starts. And we answer with a cruel grins, “No, it’s today.”

Monday morning she sat down to her bowl of oatmeal and asked, “Is it tomorrow?”

Cindy answered while brushing Mollie’s hair into a pony tail: “Today is Monday, tomorrow is Tuesday.”

“Is it tomorrow today?” Mollie persisted. “When it’s Tuesday, it will be today,” Cindy said.

If we do two ponies tomorrow, when will that be?

“And tomorrow will be Wednesday,” Noah said, trying to be helpful. “Today is Monday, yesterday was Sunday, tomorrow will be Tuesday.” Noah has the grinding patience of a six-year-old.

“Tomorrow do two ponies,” Mollie instructed Cindy the Hair Fixer.

“What day is tomorrow?” Cindy tested. “I don’t know, the other day,” Mollie answered.

“When you go to sleep, then after that’s it’s a different day,” Noah tried. “But always the same year.”

By this time, even I was getting confused, and we changed the subject. But I thought about it all day Monday. When does a kid learn what “tomorrow” means? How do you explain it? You can try, but what’s the point, I thought. Sooner or later, you get it.

Maybe that’s why Shakespeare, Dylan, and every poet on down to bottom-feeding newspaper editors like to write about “tomorrow”.

I had a similar problem when I was her age. I remember asking my brother, “If Brownsville is in Minnesota, what state is Minnesota in?”

Explaining tomorrow will make you 
feel as though you are up a tree.

He should have answered, “Not a very good one,” but he gave me some answer like Noah gave Mollie, and I didn’t understand, until one day, I just knew it. A miracle.

On Monday night, I tried to probe Mollie further. We sat in the living room after supper. A warm fire crackled in the woodstove. Mollie was lying on the floor, drawing pictures with a pen in a yellow, legal notepad. One picture per page, a few circles and the picture is done. We go through a lot of legal pads at our house.

“What is ‘tomorrow’?” I asked. I was referring to the concept.

“Tomorrow is Tuesday,” she answered. “Tomorrow is Tuesday?”

“Un-huh.”

She crawled onto my lap and showed me her picture, some circles and lines with two smudges in the middle.

“What are those?” I asked, pointing to the ink spots.

“Belly buttons,” she said with a sly laugh.

“You can’t have two belly buttons,” I said.

“No, this is a belly button and this is an owie,” the Quick Thinker responded.

So much for my probe. How do you comprehend logic like that?

I’ll figure it out tomorrow.