The universe is apparently growing larger by millions of miles each day, which certainly puts my High Interest Bank Account into a bleak perspective. By tracing this expansion backwards, we eventually arrive at a starting point that has been called “the day without yesterday.” Why not just call it ‘Monday’? It’s not as if anyone is likely to contradict you.
Yesterday never seemed like a more desirable place to be, during the pandemic. I don’t mean actual yesterday, of course, but you’ve figured that out already. We’re talking metaphorical yesterdays (or Mondays) long since gone.
Bob Dylan is often quoted as saying that whenever he hears a Gordon Lightfoot song, he “wishes it would last forever” and when I listen to lyrics like ♫I’d give all of my tomorrows for a single yesterday♫ I tend to agree, sometimes.
The Beatles longed for yesterday, the Carpenters insisted it was yesterday once more (“Looking back on how it was/Makes today seem rather sad/So much has changed”) and Mary Hopkin reminded us those were the days, my friend. ♫Just tonight I stood before the tavern, nothing seemed the way it used to be.♫ Lockdown was loathsome, Mary is just too polite to say so.
Your common sense prevails, of course, and you remind me that the sun also rises — you’ve been reading Ernest Hemingway again, I can tell — and after all, tomorrow is another day. Or is that Gone with Wind, I think it is. The point being, many of us would probably trade all our yesterdays for one single extra tomorrow, especially at my age, sorry Mr Lightfoot.
What great hardship would losing yesterday constitute, apart from remembering where our car keys got to, perhaps? That man from Stratford put things neatly in context as usual when he made Macbeth point out how all our yesterdays lead the way to dusty death. (“Life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing,” he adds, but I think I’ll skip over that idea.)
However, as Marty McFly discovered in Back to the Future, meddling with the space-time continuum can be more harmful to your health than smoking cigarettes. If we could flee from coronavirus now by retreating into the past, it would still be lurking in our future, and then where would we be?
You can gaze at the road ahead of you all you want, but sometimes your future is in your rearview mirror — which is going to be handy once self-driving cars come along. Meanwhile, as Roy Rogers used to say, “Happy trails!” But then he drove a horse. Many yesterdays ago.
