Once, it was feared that exceeding the speed of sound meant a man might outfly his voice and strangle on his screams. Not laughing, a woman tells me that the elusive entrance to a unicorn lair has been found in North Korea. Only now, because their secrets are well-kept, have we learned that skeletons are being restored, beautiful as anything in paradise. Often, there are deceits disguised so well for our desires they are designed like myths: A magician, for television, once vanished the Statue of Liberty by turning a crowd of witnesses so slowly that a country of viewers surrendered to wonder. Always, in the dictionary for easy dismissal, the list of synonyms grows long enough to seem countless, a collection that soothes our lovable longings. Our taste for myth and quackery quickens our desire to embrace each promising, suggestive hope: For instance, such trust is enough to pause me inside my office in this house, now refurbished, where a priest once lived within a set of rooms so small anyone would perceive them as a suite of cells. Always, he had terriers, two at a time, and, at last, cancer no amount of praying could cure. By then, a mile to the east, ground had been broken, foundation laid for the reconstruction of faith. The rectory, vacant a year, went dank and mildewed, cubicles of shadows. The discarded church became a clinic, its large lot a gallery of patients’ cars, the near rows for the handicapped and pregnant, a space fire-lane wide for vans that transport the helpless. In this small office transfigured by students, I put aside work for the leisure of thankfulness, keeping fear and doubt priest-secret. Listen, speed and velocity, though often used as synonyms, are not the same. Speed is travel through time; velocity includes the shift in position. Divide your changes by the years it has taken you to make them to learn time is motion with memory. Someone, after research, has learned that the most common noun is Time. Someone else, today, has written to the paper claiming to know how God prioritizes prayers, responding from innocence to brutality symbolized by children and Russia’s neo-czar. He estimates five billion prayers are mouthed per day, Time, happily, a concept different for God. Or Einstein, who declared that time, as we approach the speed of light, will slow until, after decades, we will arc back younger than grandchildren as if we have gained the limitless advantage of a now-shaken God. Consider, now, that rocket flight. In the months before he died, my father, past ninety, remembered only what he had seen first-hand, loneliness his last lesson by example how we disappear into Time.