A few days ago I wrote an essay reflecting back on my older daughter’s 16th birthday.
Then I read and reflected about an essay I wrote a few days after this daughter’s birth 16 years ago.
Wow.
How the time has passed.
I won’t say the time passed quickly. There were hard years of childrearing, and those did not pass quickly. From one point of view, the days and months from 2007 until today were full of labor and seemingly endless tasks at home and at work. The past 16 years were intense and often my time was not my own: family and work obligations took most of my time.
Yet from another perspective the years have passed quickly. I remember clearly getting married on June 21, 2003. or celebrating the millennium on December 31, 1999, or looking at my mother’s corpse after she died on October 31, 1996. The 90s were important years for me, just getting started in adult life and doing so much heavy lifting professionally and personally. The 1980s I also remember clearly, as those were the hormone-fueled fever-era where I got my start in high school and college. I still remember Jimmy Carter, the Iran hostage crisis, and cars parked outside gas stations during the energy crises of that time. I remember being bored to death as my mom was preoccupied by Nixon and the Watergate saga, as she bought me coloring books and told me to leave her be while she sat glued to the TV watching the congressional hearings. My earliest memory is watching the 1969 moon walk.
Sometimes I feel like my entire life has passed by in just a few winks of the eye. But each day was 24 hours, and week and after month added up to years, and none of this went by all that quickly at the time. 55-years is a substantial stretch of time. Neil Armstrong walking on the moon did not happen just yesterday.
It is all about perspective. As the comedian Steven Wright said, “It’s a small world. But I wouldn’t want to have to paint it.” Life might go by quickly – a few decades – and you might be surprised at the end. But try and hold your breath for a few decades, and that will seem like a long time. When you are seven, one single year seems to take forever to pass. Everything is so intense; patience is scare; boredom appears unendurable. But the years they run like rabbits later on in life, and I can sit in my car for hours waiting for my daughters to complete task. Occasionally someone will apologize to me about having to delay getting me something they promised. “Can you wait six more months, please? A year?” Easily. I can wait. No problem. I have learned patience. I will soon be 56-years old.
So I approach retirement age. The financial reward for having spent most of your life teaching in a public school is that you have a pension for the rest of your life. Is it worth it? 30 years on the job in often less than ideal circumstances, and then 60% of your already modest paycheck until death. Well, there are definite pros and cons. I might receive my pension for 25 or 30 years after retiring; that balances out the meager paychecks I received as a beginning teacher. But retirement will be another chunk of my life which will be different from previous ones. Another era of change and continuity, to speak in the argot of historians.
My father will pass away. Almost all my aunts and uncles, too, in addition to all their peers. So passes the march of generations in the parade of time. In twenty years I will become an old man. Then my daughters will grow old, too, after I am gone.
In late middle age I have turned philosophical, dear reader, as you can see.
How old am I? Well, to echo Kent’s message to King Lear on that same question:
Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing, nor
King Lear, William Shakespeare
so old to dote on her for any thing.
I am far too old to get enthusiastic watching the newest pretty young thing sing. My students laugh at my ignorance of popular culture, which is partly a pose to amuse – the old fuddy-duddy teacher – and partly real. I am old enough to start to see the big picture in life – to know it in my bones, to see my parent’s mortality (and my own), to be crushed by the understanding of death and dying, to realize how this world will crush you – but to be older also is, at the same time, to be so much more grateful just to be alive –
I wake up in the morning, just glad my boots are on
Bruce Springsteen, “Western Stars”
Instead of empty in the whispering grasses
Down the Five at Forest Lawn.
– it is to understand – to know it in my bones – how precious life is, to shake my head in amazement when a young person throws their life away – to be so thankful my body is not yet, as Springsteen sings, planted in the ground at the Forest Lawn cemetery, because sooner or later it will be – to know this not just because I read it in a book, but due to having seen it with my own eyes. Experience can be a good teacher, if you are ready to learn. One gains a measure of wisdom as one ages, at least hopefully.
So my daughter turned 16 this week. Snap your fingers and she will be 32-years old. But these next 16 years will be made up of time – here it is –
So sixteen years times two equals thirty-two years equals sixteen million eight hundred nineteen thousand two hundred minutes. Or: 32 years = 16,819,200 minutes.
Maybe it took me almost 56-years years just to understand the first things about how to live well and be comfortable in my own skin. But then your body starts falling apart, as you struggle with physical decline. But you are happier just to be alive. Your baseline for happiness is lower, and you are so much more GRATEFUL. Weird.
Now I’m just talking to myself on the page.
But isn’t that what all good personal essays are?
Isn’t an personal essay an interior conversation one pursues via the written word combined into sentences and paragraphs about your feelings and thoughts? The reader then overhears this conversation inside your head which has spilled onto the page?
Dear reader, I apologize for this meandering discursive thought-piece masquerading as a coherent essay. I sort of lost focus and control. So it goes. I’m sorry.
Lord, thank you for giving me this day – the time I have today, yesterday, and tomorrow – the time which makes up my days, past and future. I am GRATEFUL. I appreciate the gift of my life.
I know it won’t last forever.
Amen.
