The foreman announces that the Acme Calendar Company of Greater Guatemala was just awarded the lucrative contract to produce another stone with the beginning date of December 22, 2012 and ending some five or six thousand years in the future (I’ll leave the exact calculations to a 5th grade honor student). The stonecutter is left standing there holding a chisel and mallet in his callused, arthritic hands, stunned beyond belief. Only moments before his spirit had been soaring with the condors, but now Pajar’s morale is crushed.
The disheartened fellow gathers his tools and lunch box, retrieves his llama from the parking lot attendant and makes the long commute back home to his loving wife, eight children, and his in-laws.
However long it took the stonecutter to finish this massive piece, he must have felt entitled to a break before beginning labor on page two. After all, no one was actually going to need the next calendar for several dozen generations. It was time to spend his hard-earned wages and take the family on that well-deserved vacation to Cancun he’d been promising; he could almost taste those fancy poolside drinks with the colorful little umbrellas.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Tinaalto had been anxiously awaiting the competition of the Mayan calendar, too. She had plenty of time to amass a long list of chores for her husband while he chiseled away from dawn until nightfall, “The roof leaks until the floor turns to mud and the landlord says our rental agreement doesn’t include insurance. The left wheel on the ox cart wobbles so much that my mother vibrated right off the back of it on the way to market last week! She broke her arm and several pieces of my best pottery. And don’t you think for a moment that I’ve forgotten you’ve been promising me new curtains in the dining room for the past Haab’.”
“Yes, dear,” comes the meek reply from her weary husband, “Time flies. One Haab’ just blurs into the next these days.”
Trivia fans will be interested to know that a Haab’ is the solar aspect of the Mayan calendar comprised of 18 months containing 20 days each, plus five ‘nameless days’. I’ll do the math on this one for you; a Haab’ equals 365 days. Sound familiar?
So our protagonist, Pajar, decided to set new priorities in his life and procrastinated commencing work on the next calendar. Once he was mentally ready to take up his stonecutting tools again the calendar company declared bankruptcy, because customers realized no one needed a personal calendar on the wall now that they all shared that big rock sitting in the center of town. The marketing department completely overlooked that little detail.
Fast forward to modern times and archeologists are left scratching their heads, “That’s it? The world ends? What should we do?”
Good question. What should we do? Contemplating the possibility of having a finite number of days left on earth might not actually be such a bad way to live, especially since it’s true individually, if not globally. And along your journey though space and time as you complete your own ‘bucket list’, if should you find yourself with a lot of time on your hands (please excuse the Acme Mayan Calendar Company humor), a search on the internet will provide mind-boggling, information about the wondrously complex, multi-faceted Mayan calendar and the (real) culture behind it.
©2012 Roberta McReynolds for SeniorWomen.com
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