Chunks of Time
This one’s for Todd….
I covet the certainty of young eyes that see so clearly before the world gets in the way. Austyn, my granddaughter, is almost two-and-a-half, and mostly she’s pretty clear about what she wants. But what she always knows for sure is what she doesn’t.
Occasionally, we get to have a sleepover, this angel child and me. She comes to GG’s to spend the night, I do a touchdown dance, and then we do whatever she wants to do until it’s time for her to go home. In between the spoiling, however, I try to get the rituals right. She must finish lunch before she can have a popsicle. We count to ten as she brushes her teeth. And we do our best to save her screen time for where mom and dad try to keep it—right before going to bed. Her favorite videos are held as dessert to help her “wind down” from the day. After her bath and the unchoreographed escapade of putting on her pjs, she runs around the couch like she’s at NASCAR in anticipation of watching her upcoming shows. She can’t wait to name her pleasure.
I go down the list: Ms. Rachel… CoComelon… Blippi… Bluey….? “SLIME VIDEOS!” she screams. It’s the unexplainable favorite pastime of children everywhere.
Austyn is glued to my phone, enthralled with the incredulous crunching of slime, when suddenly she starts to come unwound. “Not this one!!!!” she begins to chant desperately, her voice rising in octave, tone, and decibel. A bright shade of red is climbing up her face and her eyes look frantic. “NOT THIS ONE!!!!”
“Whoa. Don’t Panic.” I say, “Just tell me what you want. Do not panic,” I repeat as I reach to take the phone in search of a preferred episode that will do the winding down.
She responds through staccato, sobby breath, “The rainbow one.” I find it, press the triangle pointing to the right in the center of the screen, and she is immediately happy in every corner of her face.
Fast forward twenty minutes.
Slime time ends. We brush her teeth. Read a book. Say our prayers. I tell her the story of the three bears. Then the three bears mish-mashed with Cinderella. Then the three bears and Cinderella with a Dumbo sighting in the middle. She wants another story still, and I am out of leads. I tell her for the fifteenth time, “It’s time to go to sleep.” But she keeps talking. I tell her she has to put her voice away, so she whispers conversations with everything in sight. She talks to her stuffed animals, the pictures on the wall, her hands, my elbow…for almost an hour she flips and flops and whisper-talks, doing everything within her power not to go to sleep.
I finally come undone.
“Austyn, you HAVE to go to sleep!” I say, my tone shifting from “GG cool” to “Mom-I-Mean-It.” She recognizes it immediately and locks her eyes with mine.
“GG, don’t panic,” she authoritatively says. And a sly grin slowly spreads across her face as if to say, I know things you have forgotten. Or maybe never really knew.
* * *
A friend of mine is, currently, courageously (as if there is another way) fighting a tumor in his brain. The war started about three years ago when doctors gave him very little hope to make it another trip around the sun. Then, to the surprise of no one who knows him, he bucked the odds. What followed was a tedious, high-risk surgery that gave him less than a 50-50 chance. He left that deal in the dust, too. For the past two years, he’s been good. As good as a man can be, that is, with a time bomb in his head. Today, he has his beautiful family, an impressive resume of life’s work, and a recent test result that says the tumor is on the aggressive and they’re out of weapons to try to make it slow its pace.
But you won’t find panic within a mile of this guy.
He lives gratefully. Peacefully even. He’s not in a frenzied rush, but he is chin-up, eyes-focused-forward, and he is living every day. Like little Austyn who has zero tolerance for wasting her precious twenty minutes on a show she’s already seen or doesn’t love, he wants every single second to count. He doesn’t engage in drivel, or sit through bad movies, or feel compelled to keep reading to the end of a not-great book. Time is a gift he’s unwrapping every minute.
I first met him, my friend Todd, on “The Hill”-- the nickname for our college campus that to me just referenced the wind. It blew right through us there regardless of where we stood. Todd was a “city boy” who wore preppy polo shirts, often with the collar turned up, and dock shoes without socks as soon as the weather turned warm. He was a terrific athlete, though he didn’t come to school to play a sport, and I think if you asked him now, he’d tell you he had no idea then what it was he had come to college to do. Or be.
He sure figured it out though. What a life he’s built.
You could probably find him today-- if you went looking--walking in his weighted vest or driving his favorite convertible or with his Bible, opened to scripture, worshipping God. His once searching eyes of translucent blue have turned certain over time. Like the two-year old who teaches me, he knows some things for sure.
Clear eyes recognize that chunks of time have borders. Live.
P.S. Satisfying Slime