Time Keeps On Slipping

Into The Future

We snapped our fingers, and another month disappeared, just like that.

Our daughter just took her daughter in for her two-month checkup; she observed to us that time seemed to be accelerating. She and her husband are intent on relishing every moment of their baby’s new life. I thought to myself, we did that, and yet time still slipped away.

I often see young parents with their children out and about, and in situations where kids are cranky, and the parents seem a little stressed. I will smile and say something to the effect of, “Watch out, the next thing you know, they are going to be living in a different city.” Most of the time, this leads to a little connection that I always enjoy. Young parents tend to accommodate the strange old people who engage them as they go about their day.

It seems like a couple of weeks ago I was pushing my own daughters in a stroller on the way to our favorite park, or reading them their favorite bedtime story. How is it possible that the child in that stroller last week now has a child of her own?

Is this just me, or is this a common human experience? Meaningful events and experiences from decades ago seem like they just happened. Time feels very non-linear. It can make me dizzy.

Memory is tricky. My older brother remembers every phone number from every house we have lived in, going back over half a century. What I remember vividly are feelings, how happy I was walking home after school, the warmth of the sun on my face on an early spring day, the sound dried leaves make when the wind sends them spinning on an autumn afternoon, with Halloween around the corner.

We used to go trick-or-treating with pillow cases. This was in Fairway, Kansas. There was a nearby neighborhood with dozens of modest brick homes on tiny lots, up and down the tree-lined streets. The neighborhood was built shortly after WWII to provide housing for returning soldiers and their booming families. One of my friends at the time lived in one of those houses. We understood that the name of the game was volume, so high-density neighborhoods were the best for maximizing our take.

Directly adjacent, there was another neighborhood with much larger homes, including one owned by the Russel Stover candy family. The brick Tudor-style mansion had green awnings decorated with ornate RS initials. On Halloween, they would send their driver in his uniform down to park their limo at the end of their long driveway, outside the formidable cast-iron gates, to hand out pre-made lunch sacks of Russel Stover candies from the cavernous trunk. We would cover the dense neighborhood first and then finish our route at the Stover estate. I still have a soft spot for Russel Stover chocolates.

In the summer, we were basically kicked out of the house at breakfast. A group of us would test our wills by walking barefoot on asphalt hot enough to burn uncalloused feet, but they didn’t stay uncalloused for long.

We’d play “kill the man with the ball” for hours, or baseball, or football, only taking breaks to satisfy a well-earned thirst from the garden hose. We needed to wait for the hot water to run out of the hose, but even when it was cold, it still always tasted a little bit like the hose. After lunch, we’d be firmly instructed to be home when the street lights came on.

We didn’t have air conditioning. Instead, we had a massive attic fan that sucked the hot air out of the house at night. It sounded like a small airplane, so we didn’t need a white noise generator to fall asleep. As summer rolled on, the cicadas would come out. Their buzzing signified that our joyous season of freedom was ending, and a new school year was about to start.

Unbelievably, that was over half a century ago.

When we moved to Oregon when I was 12, our friends followed our car for as long as they could on their stingray bicycles, waving goodbye. Having already moved once before, we knew what was going to happen. That was it. We weren’t going to be seeing any of them again. We’d be making new friends out west.

Until we were able to drive, our options for getting to school were feet, bike, or bus. That’s how I made my first friends actually, on the bus. When you get off at the same stop, you get the opportunity to get to know people. Later on in high school, my brother and I shared a sky-blue convertible Chevy Malibu. We played chicken with who could leave it with the least amount of gas, so the other one had to fill it up. Every time I think about coasting down the hill to our driveway on fumes, I have to smile.

Those childhood summers seemed to last forever. Now I blink, and each season disappears. While this has always made mathematical sense to me, it still leaves me uneasy. When I was five, one year represented 20% of my entire life, so of course it seemed like a long time. Now, it is well under 2%, so it is no wonder time has accelerated.

Long after childhood, in my twenties, a friend and I spent an afternoon playing paddleball on a beach in Rhode Island. It was a perfect beach day, and I was transported back to the front yard of that house in Kansas. I laughed so hard and for so long that my stomach hurt. We may have been technically adults, but for a few hours, we were little boys again. I have that day saved forever.

That same friend used to cajole me into staying out by reminding me that “when you’ve been dead for 10,000 years, that’s a small percentage of the time you will be dead.” That pitch hasn’t worked for decades, but with each passing season, as they blur together, I am trying my best to fully appreciate every sunrise, sunset, song, story, and most importantly, the people who cross my path.