“A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

—Joseph Cotten as Bernstein in Citizen Kane (1941)

Last week: Thursday, March 1, 2012. Husband left for work at 3:00 a.m., got the children up and dressed, lunches made, five mile commute to the school, morning play date, midday handoff with the husband, and the afternoon in my office finishing up a major foundation grant report. Lots of driving, driving, driving. $1.58 tall regular from Starbucks; crushed Cheerios in between the seat cushions of the car.

And all along, in the back of my mind and on the surface of my breathing, like something I was trying to memorize—Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner—it kept occurring to me that today, March 1, was Mrs. X’s birthday.

Mrs. X: My childhood next door neighbor, invariably kind and faithful, the first mother I’d ever known to put in a day’s work outside the house as a bookkeeper and still make homemade fried chicken and hush puppies before the evening news. Who had, at the critical juncture after my father died, had continued to be a friend to my mother, even when my mother had not responded in kind. Who had been a fixture in my life for decades, but beyond a few fleeting visits, had not been a regular participant in any ongoing, major way. And yet, still.

By 5:00 p.m. I was back in my house—no fried chicken or hush puppies in sight—not being able to stand it any more, picked up the phone receiver. I dialed the number from memory, without even hesitating, and left a rambling birthday message on her answering machine.

And how it felt to dial that number: As though I were falling down a well, in which the past, the present, and the future were, in that moment, of my thinking-and-acting to make the phone call, conjoined. A moment of kindness from Mrs. X in, perhaps, 1978, had burst forth in my life in 2012 once again as real and palpable as my hands in front of me.

In that moment, I felt I had entered Cosmic Time.

It’s not an understatement to say that I live for that feeling. You could be a girlfriend from boarding school calling me from Thailand at four o’clock in the morning, and it would seem completely ordinary to me to talk about your disintegrating marriage and then remember that night we lay in the quad looking up at the stars, and you quoted Crosby, Stills, and Nash “the past is just a goodbye,” and look here we were, the Past not a Goodbye at all!

But it’s not at all restricted to events involving childhood or emotionally deep experiences only—it can be only a fleetingly intense, inexplicably moment of connection: the widow Sadie who sat next to me on a flight to Atlanta in 1997, the vibrant Latina novelist Anjanette Delagado, with whom I had one conversation in 2006, and with whom I have stayed in touch since.

Does anyone else feel like this? (And I would love, via the comment boxes below, to hear about your own experiences of what I guess I will call, for lack of a better phrase, “immanent transcendence.”)

Of course they do, everybody does: It was this kind of emotion that was the great power of Facebook in its initial incarnation. (And despite the fact I have actually known people who divorced their spouses after “reuniting” with lost loves on Facebook, the real benefit for most people is getting to surreptitiously snoop on the lives of others, without anybody except Mark Zuckerberg et al. observing them.)

Most people in my experience, though, have certain kinds of internal brakes that keep them from calling up the old roommate out of the blue, from writing the note when the childhood friend’s grandparent dies, from automatically writing the $25 check for the friend’s child—not seen since the first Clinton administration, when she was a baby—to go on a Mission Trip to China:

“Why don’t you call up X?” I ask my older brother, concerning an old and dear friend of his that he fell out of touch with, and whom we’ve both worried about over the years. “Yeah, I know I should,” he says, hesitating. “Why don’t you see if you can go find him on the internet for me?”

That reaction is the one that seems more normal to me, somehow. Things change; people move on. We google them later and find out that they are dead.

What I worry about my own reaction is its potential for narcissism: Is the emotion I feel, the constant dragging of past into present into future, merely a narcissistic projection—a grand selfishness? And hardly the kenotic act of intercommunion that I’d wish it to be?

Is it linear time I’m afraid of? Does it have something to do with, physics—today’s theology code-talk for people who claim they don’t believe in theology?

Perhaps an analogy will help, taken from the March page of a calendar in my kitchen, from the Jewish Museum of Kiev, that deftly links Torah, Purim, and Pisces:

In Judaism, the fish represents the Jewish people in their natural environment—in the waters of Torah.

I am a fish, swimming in these evanescent moments, the souls their faces shining.