In three weeks it will be 23 years since my mother died. My mom was 55-years old when she passed away from lung cancer, and I will be 55 myself in three and a half years.
I was at a work training last Friday where I spoke with an English teacher from another high school. She had had the option to be part of the inaugural freshman class at the high school where I worked back in 2000. This lady was already 35-years old now and not a beginning teacher anymore, and it is strange to think that while she was starting high school I was already well into my teaching career. We are none of us as young as we used to be, I reflected to myself. Similarly, I was talking the other day with a former student who is now a family practice doctor.
“How old are you now, Kyle? Like 28 or 29-years old?”
“I am 32-years old, Mr. Geib!” he replied. He remarked that maybe his new haircut made him look younger than he was.
Wow.
I started my webpage as my mom was dying in the fall of 1996. It is still up. Bill Clinton was president then and the Internet was in its infancy. I wrote the html code myself.
Now it is 2019 and Donald Trump is president. It seems the Internet has mostly been taken over by e-commerce, social media, streaming video, and free pornography. People carry the equivalent of a 1996 full size personal computer in the smartphone in their pocket.
Actually, the small-ish smartphones in our pockets today are much more powerful than the big desktop computers on our desks in 1996. But does the technological marvel which is the iPhone result in more human happiness for its owner? Over the past two decades has technology evolved in a way so that we live better? Has the development of the Internet over time made it a better place? The results would be decidedly mixed, methinks.
Time, “sluttish time.” The passing of life via the slipping away of time. I count the years until retirement. “There will be a presidential election next year, and then I will be 53,” I reason with myself. “Then when the next president is elected I will be already 57 and almost 58, and retirement will be just around the corner!” Marking the time, the passage of time. As Robert Graves sings —
Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.
Sometimes I reflect that time cannot pass quickly enough. An older tennis buddy heard me talk this way and said I would be 60-years old before I knew it. The days might pass slowly, but the months and the years they will run like rabbits. This is the same stuff veteran parents told me about the early years with newborns and toddlers, and they were sort of right, sort of wrong.
It does seem like time gradually speeds up with age. When I was seven years old, it took a seeming eternity for an entire year to pass. A year flies by now. I can hardly believe I have been in my current job for twenty years. That I am in my twenty-seventh year of teaching. Or fifty-third year of life.
Or that it has been nearly twenty-three years since my mom died.
Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.” Thoreau has been dead for 158 years, but when I read Walden it is just as if Thoreau were next to me speaking in my ear. The ability of a thinker to transcend time and place. Time doesn’t matter; truth matters. Truth transcends. As Walt Whitman sings,
It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d.
It is like I am right there with Uncle Walt crossing the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Well, it is 163 years later and here we are:
Closer yet I approach you,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,
I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.
Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?
Soon enough my father will be dead, along with my mother and stepmother, and I will be, alas, an orphan, along with my brother and sister. Then more years and still more years will pass by — the days dropping like rain from the heavens, one after the other. They add up. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock — the inexorable march of the clock. Times passes. Then more time passes. A decade speeds by. My daughters will be adults — grown and flown the coop. I will have become an old man. To be in one’s fifties is to know — in one’s bones — that life is finite.
These are the years of my life. Accumulating like rain drops in a bucket of water. Like a clock whose hands will eventually reach midnight.
Am I doing what I want to do? Am I using my time well?
Ben Franklin wrote, “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.” It was as true for him as it is for me. And as true as it is for you, gentle reader.
Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.
