A Mammoth’s Tooth

I had to check the spelling of “mammoth” because I haven’t encountered the word in a while. But it was the topic of last night’s voice note from a dear colleague and friend. This week, she had dinner with a friend who brought old rocks and aquatic animal’s teeth found by fishers on a beach. She told me that as she was looking at the rocks on the table, holding them. Her friend told them this:

“This is probably the first time in hundreds of years that these rocks, bones, and teeth have been held by human hands.”

Upon hearing this, my friend, suddenly, felt zoomed out of time, or rather felt so strongly the presence of time, it’s immensity, and how this point of contact had bended — making her life of thirty something years encounter a hundred years of existence through a single touch.

When I heard this on the voice note of my phone, I felt how lucky it was, or how lucky I was that she experienced this and now, through sound waves on a phone, I experience it too. How many times do I encounter things or instances as rare as a mammoth’s tooth, and be completely oblivious to its existence in time. Time too immense and things and life and people, too complex to understand that it gets difficult to be clear sighted at how miraculous it is to encounter each other, almost as impossible as holding a mammoth’s tooth on your left on a random Tuesday night.