Devoured By Time

As a youngster, I would have said, time is real because we can measure it, but unlike milk which can be smelled, felt and drunk by the cup, quart, or gallon, time is more abstract. The world measures it in seconds, hours, days, months, years, but it has been done in sunrises, moon phases, and probably a million other ways, "over time."

Now that I am back in familiar territory I am invited to all the little celebrations family uses to mark the passage of time and lives. Last week it was a confirmation. This week I went to a first birthday party for my great nephew. This thing called time moves forward like a great vampire, devouring the life force of everything within it as it creeps along. Slowly stretching infants into adults, it appears to be a giver of life in the beginning, but later on, as these same bodies begin to shrink and shrivel and become wizened, it appears as the grim reaper.

My awareness of time really began when I was ten years old and realized that when my father recalled an event ten years earlier, I could not yet do that. Now my attention is caught again as I realize that I can recall my own child's first birthday as clearly as if it were yesterday. I close my eyes, allowing my mind to drift, and it is still 1978, until I open them to the sounds of today's laughter. I am a time traveler who is unfettered by the hissing tubes and rattling steam engines of sci-fi movies.

I wonder, when I reach that stage where almost all the juice has been sucked out of me and I am drying up like a raisin in the sun, if I will choose the time I want to be in, or if it will choose me?