The past is a thing. It’s a noun. It’s about where or when.
So it could be a place or a time. I guess it could be both too. It’s easier to
see how it’s a time. “Back then” being a point in time, something before now.
It’s harder to see how it’s a place. “We were driving on the highway and we
passed Sally and Dave driving their DeLorean.” That point back there in the
past when we passed Dave and Sally. Still feels like a when. Or how about
“Where’s the gas station? Well you drive toward the center of town and just
past the yellow dog on the corner you make the first left.” There it is, that
point just past the yellow dog.
Passed, on the other hand, is a tense of a verb; the past
tense to be specific.
Marbles McGill sat on a stool by the door of the bar his brother
and uncle owned and thought about grammar. The stool was the one the bouncer
sat on when there was a big game on and the place got maybe a little crowded
and rowdy. A few times a week that was.
The bouncer, Dennis Hanlon, wasn’t a permanent employee of the McGill
family, so it wasn’t Dennis’ stool, as it were, he was just someone hired from
time to time on an as-needed basis (i.e. night of the big game) which Dennis
didn’t mind. He was what some might call a free-spirit, though not Dennis
because that phrase would sound a little “faggy” to him. Dennis lifted weights
at the gym and this led to odd jobs here and there which you would understand
if you saw Dennis, say, walking down the street, imposing enough in street
clothes even in the winter. If you saw him actually working out at the gym and
saw how he attracted or repelled, depending on the person, it would be easy to
see how a subset of those people (both the attracted and the repelled) would
experience a moment of clarity, like “hey you know that thing that I needed
done? This fucking guy would be perfect.” Those kinds of things tended to, more
often than not, pay well and well enough for Dennis to not have to work
regular.
Marbles was the opposite. Not “non-descript” as
much as unpleasant enough to look at as to make people want to look away and
never look again and to then go through whatever mental exercise might be
required to wipe the memory of what they had seen permanently away. There was a
copious amount of dandruff and warts, the largest of which protruded enough
above his right temple that it might even be thought to be a horn if you
stopped to consider but no one ever did because, you know, all your brain power
would soon be at work eliminating all traces of Marbles from your mind. When
Marbles looked in the mirror he saw on his own face a cross section of all the
worst features of every McGill he had ever seen. Like Uncle Charles’ fat and
exploded nose, with both burst blood vessels and a trench down the center that
divided the purple flesh into two meaty pork loins. Then there were Granny
Didi’s earlobes, two thick white clothes-lined blankets flapping in the wind, second
cousin Mike’s caterpillar eyebrows and Autie Lucy’s corncob teeth. On and on it
went. Marbles, instead spent a lot of time thinking on the theory that he
should at least have his wits about him.
