Time

Time

Where does it go? My mother would say we fritter it away.  And away it does go.
I started this blog as I approached 60 and realized unlike the Tim Mc Graw song My Next Thirty Years I was done with those and about to start my last 30 years.  If I were lucky...  my dad got 31, my mom 27.

And then I got busy.  After my dad died in January of 2018 I was compelled to write. But as I discovered, not to hit the publish button.  Another 5 months have passed and a milestone birthday just happened a week ago.  Even the government acknowledges that I'm old.  I had mistyped that as "millstone" birthday and in some ways it has been a millstone.   For years I've fought my age and aging and remained youthful in my thoughts and actions. Or at least tried to maintain that I was not encumbered by this annual passage around the sun.

But now I'm on the outer ring of that orbit around the sun.  No parents or grandparents to buffer my flying out of orbit and into the great unknown.

I feel the need to stop and smell the roses. Well and pull the weeds around my roses.  And , and ,and.

So much to do, so little time.  So little time left.  I know this feeling will leave but its like a slow trickle out of the hour glass and when its empty I will be gone.  Gone like my dad, gone like my mom. Someone new living in their house. All their belongings somewhere new. Somewhere not with them.

And what are these things, but things.  Harvey taught that to so many that things are just things as everything went to the curb.  Now its Kilauea.  A man posted about the  plants and trees and gardens that he had nurtured for 18 years; gone along with his house and his land and his view and his life as he knew it.  We seem so permanent; our stuff seems permanent.  But mother nature reminds us life is temporary, ephemeral and tenuous. But I will tell you, I love having my parents things around my house.  I love walking into the room and seeing the chair my mother sat in every day.  I love sitting at the desk that my mother sat at and her mother before that. I love setting the table with my great grandmothers dishes.  And while I know they are not in these things, they seem infused with their presence.  

Life will return to normal and  time will speed up with busy-ness and I won't be wanting to ponder life's greater meaning. Maybe I will just be wondering what is on TV or where the Astros are in the standings. Maybe I'll disappear into a book. Maybe we'll have a family get together. But in the back of my mind I will be humming Peggy Lee's Is That All there is; or maybe What's it All About Alfie?
And I will know the clock is ticking and the bell will toll.....