TIME MARCHES ON

"South moves north, north moves south
a star is born, a star burns out
the only thing that stays the same is
everything changes, everything changes"

—Tracy Lawrence, "Time Marches On"

I think there was a TV show in the 1950’s called ‘AS TIME MARCHES ON’.

Recently I had dinner with a fellow blogger (http://jpantaleno.blogspot.com/) from my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, a yearly event since his birthday is the day before mine and yet we never knew each other in the old days, going to the same school, living around the corner, etc. The dinner is a wonderful tradition we started among ourselves about 5 years ago that in reality salutes our common pasts. We are both Italian/American, raised with the same standards and expectations and he didn’t disappoint anyone in his life that I can see. It got me thinking.

All this time I have been alive, so many days have passed by, like flipping through the pages of a book, and each book a year in my life, I have a lot of books on the shelf. I can’t help but wonder how many are left to read.

Time can do funny things to you, it can distort the truth, make things larger than they really are, disappear in gaps like the tapes Nixon didn’t have in the Watergate investigation. Of course my perspective has never changed, I am still that young person I always was, just surprised that they changed everything from the way I knew it. And who the hell is that in my mirror every morning?

Of course TLW (The Little Woman) changed without telling me! Subtle changes that I never noticed! It was an accommodating evolution that worked in tandem with everything else. All good by the way!

I think I have many children. I don’t remember them all being born: just 4 have the recollection for me. There was of course the infants, but also there once was a little girl who roamed around the house, who came to me and I comforted when she needed it, there was a little blond kid, baseball mitt at the ready, did anyone see him lately? There was a graduation from an elementary school where a pre-teenager won a dictionary from his school because they thought highly of him but hasn’t called in years.

 

And so it is with friends and relatives, gone in the past and then one day you see them for the first time and marvel that one has changed and one never did.

There are things that I cherished that will no longer be, the excitement of my grandmother’s big kitchen, the wonderfully colorful characters that came and graced her table, my cousins and aunts and uncles, all gone or a distant memory.

There are places that I remember: misty fog bound places that exist no more. The idea that they ever existed and stood so resolutely and without question, now have disappeared like whispers in the wind.

Today is loud and alive, filled with the noise that I will long for someday, filling another book, making me wish once again for it to still be here. There are beautiful nieces and nephews that are having beautiful children, building lives and creating newer days to scribe in the book of time.

Of course in our lives we have days we would like to forget but won’t or shouldn’t. There are times we wish we had back and things we said or did that make us wish to recall and do over. They are all there in the pages that flipped by, someday I will read them once more.

Now that I am older, and more orderly, I don’t hurry anymore. This is not because of physical limitations, but because of mental control: I want to enjoy what I see at the moment, laugh at myself and know that I don’t need to rush ahead toward tomorrow, the here and now is beautiful enough.