The Chameleon Called Time
Like most Americans, I remember exactly where I was on the morning of April 19, 1995. I couldn’t, if I wanted to, forget. This past weekend Oklahoma honored, as it has done annually since the horror in the heartland, the lives lost and the lives changed forever on that tragic day. On Saturday from the memorial grounds, a 91-year old man who had lost his wife in the bombing and had returned for the ceremony of commemoration said, “It was 30 years ago, but when I return to this spot, it feels as if it was 30 seconds ago.”
Time. We cannot pin it down.
The following essay is an excerpt from my latest book The Compost File: Stories for the Striver in Us All.
Five minutes, when you’re waiting for a verdict, a diagnosis, or laying head-toward-floor in a dentist’s chair with your mouth propped open on blocks, feels eternal. Seconds drip as if distended, each one clinging mercilessly to the one that came before. But five minutes, when you’re reading a powerful page-turner, or playing a game you love, or holding a sweet sleeping baby in your arms, fly. The seconds chase each other in a full-out sprint, barely touching as they hand off the baton.
Rarely do five minutes ever feel the same.
Time is a chameleon, sometimes flowing, sometimes dragging and mostly moving at a speed we do not prefer at the time. We chase it and we curse it as it stretches and shrinks intermittently, ushering us on like an inchworm. We are captives of its pace.
When my kids were young and I would go on a recruiting trip for more than two days, the time between departure and return loomed like a bloated whale. In my head, three days was a lifetime. I would convince myself before leaving that when I got back, the three-year-old I’d left behind would have hair all the way down her back, braces on her teeth, and a prom dress on layaway with matching ankle-strap stiletto heels. Hyperbole is a young mother’s superpower. Every drive to the airport reeked of angst. And the minutes while I was gone? They slow-dripped like a leaky bathtub faucet while I watched other people’s kids play ball. If a tournament ended early, I’d do almost anything within my power to get home sooner than I’d planned. Red-eye flights and 4 a.m. wake-up calls were the norm. “I’ll sleep when they’re grown,” I told myself. Time puffed up like a dragon and scorched my peace of mind.
For parents and their kids, and eventually kids and their parents, time is a wild horse that cannot be tamed. The days are sometimes tedious inside the minutes, but they gallop on despite our fiercest efforts to rein them in. Our kids leave for kindergarten in the morning and come home at the end of the day with a high school diploma in their hands. Where does the middle go? One day our dads are fixing the roof and the next we’re hiding the car keys from them and picking up a walker at the local Medical Mart.
It’s a hurry-up-wait-a-minute cadence. The way Father Time usually travels when carrying people and things that we love.
Time may march in uniformity, but that’s rarely how we experience it. And though it’s neutral, it often shifts in shade depending on our internal perceptions. Like one of those rugs that appears to be mostly blue when looked at with the lay of the pile from one side of the room and mostly tan when looked at against the grain from the other, circumstances color how the clock moves. Time and space shared by two different people can feel massively disparate. A movie flies by for you and drags on for me. Practice, to one player, seems like it just started and to another as if it will never end. The pace time takes is personal.
In downtown Oklahoma City, where the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building used to be, a memorial now stands. It is flanked on the east and west sides by two giant gates of time. One gate is stamped 9:01 and the other 9:03. The minute that is missing is the one that changed everything.
Sometimes time soars. Sometimes it hovers. And sometimes it appears to stop.
When we look at it over our shoulder, it’s difficult to fathom where it has gone. Time is elusive like that. Hard to pin down, hard to accurately measure, and even harder to know what to do with because we never can be sure of how much we have.
P.S. The Living Years