The meter is running

Numbers boggle me. The how many and how much: the number of grains of sand on the shore or stars in the sky, miles to the sun, speed of light, dollars of national debt, victims of genocide, heartbeats in the span of a life. The scale of things: the large (as of August 12, 2006, Voyager 1 was over 9.3 billion miles from the Sun) and the small (Planck’s length: a millionth of a billionth of a centimeter). I can no more wrap my tiny mind around these things than an agnostic can the Godhead. Not that I’ve figured that out either. On some things you let others do the math and simply stand there with mouth (and mind and heart) agape.

We had family in from England this week and as we cooed over the 2 year and 4 month old children of Wayne’s cousins, who just a minute ago were doing the same over ours, I was again taken aback by the speed of time and a great yearning to roll back the clock. Despite the mindblowing discoveries of quantum physics and its time/space paradoxes which might have you assuming such a possibility might exist, time moves in only one direction. Onward. The cream will not unpour from the coffee. The days of our toddlers toddling are over. Apart from checking out a DVD someday from St. Peter’s library and watching a replay of those days of our lives, all that is left of them is what my miserly memory deigns to ration out. Which is, maddeningly, not much. And certainly not enough.

So I find myself anxious about what is fleeting by all too fast and mourning the passing of events almost before they’ve dawned. A bit of a quandary when you are attempting to savor the moments of your life. I think that is the sadness that dogs our heels as soon as we are out of adolescence, if not before. The perpetual relinquishment: everything heading toward its end even as it arrives. Nothing sits still. And always the regret that you didn’t quite milk the occasion for all it was worth while you still could. As if that were possible.

We had a long awaited family visit this week but so much work to do that we barely spent time with guests who most likely will not be able to make it back for quite a long time. Time together was pushed to late nights and the weekend by the obligations of our continually overloaded schedule. We hosted a small, impromptu gathering of friends in their honor on Thursday evening and by late Thursday night I had the beginnings of a sore throat which bloomed ferociously by Friday morning. I dragged myself through the last couple of days we had with them, trying to keep my head from exploding. And now they are gone.

The idea in moving to a rural area was to tamp down our place in the rat race a few notches. So far it has not panned out; if anything we’re busier than ever. I learn what my friends are up to electronically—via their email, blogs, photos uploaded to websites. Who has time for a phone call, much less a visit? It’s a far cry from days I didn’t know were soon to be extinct—when women had time to hang out with each other and their kids. I’m sure there were days when my stay at home mom (SAHM) was stressed and busy (in which vacuuming inevitably played a part but whether it was the chicken or the egg is as yet undetermined) but what I remember is coming home from school and flopping down in a kitchen chair eager for the neighbor ladies to mosey over, once their own children had been greeted and turned loose to play outside, for their daily round of coffee, cigarettes, refills, gossip and giggles.

There was usually a table full, haloed by hazy smoke and affection that expanded until the last chuckle, when they had to go get supper on. Each day I wanted to prolong the minutes before they carried their cups to the sink and slid their lighters back into the cellophane wrappers of their cigarette packs, wanted to sit there forever listening to their stories, to Betty’s jokes in her Georgia drawl and Jan’s scandalous escapades, to watch Ruth’s eyes crinkle when she laughed, to remain in the happy fog of those fond and familiar fixtures of my adolescence. They each knew the others’ kids, our skinned knees, our first dates, our fevers and broken bones. There was an ease and fullness about their interactions that doesn’t replicate in lunch dates shoehorned into lunch hours or multitasking over kids’ playdates. How could I have guessed the tenor of those careless days would become as exotic as ______ ? (it occurs to me that nothing once considered exotic is still exotic. You can get anything from anywhere now, really. Only time has grown exotic.)

These manic days are the moments of my life ticking by, irretrievable tomorrow. I moved across the country in hopes that life would slow down enough for me to notice it before it's gone. Apparently the problem is not a matter of geography. A pewter bowl sits on my kitchen table holding walnuts and a nutcracker. It takes time to crack a walnut and chase the meat from all its chambers. An appropriate wedding gift from two of the ladies who graced my mom’s kitchen table for many a rowdy hour. One day I’m going to figure out how to order my life in such a way that I might find a few good friends sitting around my table in the late afternoon while I refill their coffee cups and we giggle at nothing much and our children store up fond memories of the ladies who laughed and the ladies who loved them.