The Far Side of the Moment
An Essay
by Maria HummelJune 2020
The Story, the Moment, and Momentum
I once knew a man who had a dog named Wilson, King of Prussia. He’d named him after a Phish song. Wilson was a black barrel-chested mutt. An adopted stray.
One time the man was driving them up a mountain highway, and Wilson leaped out through the truck’s open window. The dog plummeted, far down a steep slope. The man was sure he’d died. But Wilson hadn’t died, because I met them both a year later.
What I related above was not a story. It doesn’t have enough, you might tell me after reading it. What is enough? Or more precisely, how is enough? There are many answers to this question. Yet as I sit here at my desk, on the umpteenth day of quarantine in a global pandemic, feeling time stretch and contract in my isolation, I’m ready to state that one of a storyteller’s most pressing concerns is momentum.
