I recently read a very interesting quote. “As people grow older, time seems to speed up. Everything seems new in childhood … so that causes us to store the memory as something special” — Marc Wittmann, in “Felt Time”
This explains a commonly cited explanation for why childhood feels endless. As each moment passes, your comprehension of what time is is exponentially growing. When you’re 2, two years is infinite. It’s as much time as you can process — if that. One year is half of eternity. A year’s passage to a 5-year-old is actually a fifth of your entire life, while at 50 it is merely a fiftieth. I’m told that when you’re 100, a second is hardly a meaningful measurement of time.
I just don’t know how else to say it. Time is strange. I am deep into the ancestry of our family tree and very blessed with boxes of photographs and memorabilia. It is an absolute delight for me to dig through boxes of things my people wore, touched, and kept. I peruse online newspapers looking for glimpses of the lives they lived. A baseball team here, a horse show there. A society page birthday party at age 14. I pore over these talismans of the past trying to soak them in and store them up. Time collapses in on itself when I’m holding my great-grandmother’s white gloves, c. 1960, in one hand and my daughter’s baby bootie, c. 1999, in the other. All of this I carefully catalog as if I can indeed “capture time.”
Meanwhile, Ancestry.com decided to tag me in scans from my own high school yearbook. That is all well and good. I think I looked cute enough. Then they went too far. TOO FAR. They had the AUDACITY to claim that photo was taken (whispers) 40 years ago? Excuse me? I graduated from high school in June of 1986. 1986 was … let me do the math … carry the one …10 years ago? Maybe 15. (Note that what my high school yearbook does NOT show is me in any kind of mathematics club). I was always wordy, never “mathy.”
I am not being facetious when I say that 1980 was, at best, 20 years ago. 1990 was 10 years ago. Somehow, however, 1976 was also 20 years ago. I don’t want to hear any of this nonsense about it being 50 years ago. Stop it. It’s 25 at best. I just don’t like how it’s all adding up. Again, let me reiterate that math is not my strong suit.
I have been married for 30 years. 3-0. Together for 34. That is more than half my life and then some. I’m thrilled but also … how did that happen? We are 28, right? I feel like our home is “new” to us, too. This despite the fact that we have also been living here for 30 years. Suffice to say, 1996 was a very busy year for us. Thirty might not be a milestone to most, but to me it feels epic.
My “babies” both have spring birthdays, so this means I am faced with some sort of weird reality where they are both 4 and 6 years old and somehow also adults who are married with careers and homes of their own. Say what? I was just handing out popsicles to a little herd of their friends on the front porch yesterday, wasn’t I?
Having kids really puts it in perspective. Then add in an interest in genealogy, ancestry and photography, and I am faced with the fact that even if we are very lucky — our time on Earth is short. A century or so, if that. I look back at my ancestors, some of whom I remember so fondly, others I have never met. I somehow still miss them all in some way or another. Now my own face peers up at me from a, ahem, 40-year-old yearbook photo. I still feel like that girl inside (I was 17). I don’t know everything. I don’t even know MOST things. I’m just out here hoping things all work out and trying to keep a positive attitude until then. Just as importantly, I still say “last year” and mean 2015.
