An Ugly Conversation give new life to a memory from a different moment in which a newlywed asked me how many people I knew who were divorced.
I told him after the 13th divorce I stopped counting and his jaw dropped. I told him I knew more than a couple of people who were widows and or widowers and he asked me if I was messing with him.
“No, not at all. I started going to weddings of friends when I was still in college. Once you reach a certain age it is not hard to know many, especially if you look at the statistics. I have ex girlfriends who are grandmothers and friends who are grandfathers. Time never stops.”
He asked me if this made me nervous and I said it didn’t and I meant it.
“What I fear is missing opportunity to spend time with the people I care most about. What I fear is missing telling the people who are important that I love them. I have noticed I hear it more from my friends now than ever before. I It isn’t uncommon for some of the guys as well as the women to say I love you. Been happening for a while.”
The Boy On The Wall
The boy on the wall grew his first beard the year his name was put up there. He had ideas about the future and some dreams about what it would look like.
Sometimes I try to go back, reach into his mind and look upon the world through his eyes. I kid around about taking his metabolism and the body that went with it but most of the time I want some of his patience back.
Patience to deal with some of the nonsense that life throws at us instead of feeling like some things have been happening for 30 years too long now.
Sometimes I wonder if that would really be helpful or if I am more patient now than I was then. It is hard to discern because I know in some areas I definitely am.
Five years seemed like a huge chunk of time to me then and now it is slightly longer than the time required to sneeze.
That is the thing about aging, the more years you put in the harder it is for smaller chunks of time to seem to have the same impact they once did.
Doesn’t mean it isn’t possible for them to because I think of 45 as being one of the hardest years of my life. If 45 was capable of taking physical form I would take it outside and only one of us would come back in.
Got a couple of other years that fit that mood and idea for me too, but I try not to focus on them as anything but tools to use to measure my progress forwards.
And given I heard news of a couple more people I know as having died I am grateful to be vertical. I can keep moving forward and building upon things.
Though I would be lying if I said there weren’t moments where I wondered.
I wrote a letter to someone saying something to the effect of time is all we have. They had said they just wanted to spend time with me and that was my response.
What I meant was it would never feel like enough but whatever we got would feel like forever
Forever being defined as a positive description and not the feeling you get during a sigmoidoscopy in which you wonder why you didn’t figure out how to get some good drugs to knock you out.
Time moves so quickly for me now that I have become far more selective about who and where I spend it with. I don’t volunteer to break bread with people that I don’t have interest in.
I don’t go places that I don’t see value in unless I am accompanying others or doing it for professional reasons.
There just isn’t enough time to do everything, so I pick and choose.
It is surreal how slow some of my childhood felt and how fast being an adult has become.
