Time Passages

 "All around the day was going down slow" is Al Stewart's poetic line. I find it's never accurate for me anymore.

It's so funny how time truly seemed to run so slow when I was young. In 1970, I was nine, and couldn't wait to turn 10. Ten meant another measure of maturity -- I think my parents may have said they would leave me home without a babysitter at 10. I recall well it took seemingly FOREVER to turn 10 -- the final 6 months in single digits seemed to last for years.

And then, as a teen, turning 18 meant everything to us LI teens. We could drink. Go to bars! And one fateful afternoon, when my friends Mark, Gerry, Mike, John, Eric and I were hanging in my room, and I was typing a paper on our old fashioned typewriter -- Mark looked over and made a momentous discovery. The typeface on my typewriter was identical to the typeface on our junior driver's licenses!

Back then, they were cardboard -- no pictures -- just your date of birth and address. If our birthyears were 1960 instead of 1961, we would all immediately be allowed to go to bars!

We shifted into full world class counterfeiter mode -- practicing on other cardboard cards, until we were confident. One by one, we placed our licenses into the carriage, and with a HARD typstroke on our birthdays, we turned the ones into zeros. All 6 of us -- conspirators.

And it worked! That weekend we drove over to Rum Bottoms, a local tavern that featured wet t shirt contests and a lot of kids from Queens and Brooklyn. We all confidently strode to the bouncer, gave him out ids, and answered confidently "1960!" when he asked our dates of birth. And indeed there was a wet t shirt contest going on. Ah -- we had flown through time, thanks to an old typewriter.

But the point was, we couldn't wait for the future. The same was true with concert tickets -- we might buy tickets for, say Neil Young playing at the Nassau Collisseum 4 months hence, and it seemed FOREVER for those 4 months to pass.

These days, 4 months seems like a week to me. It truly seems like yesterday that Wifey and I had a baby girl and a toddler sister, and now, somehow, they're turning 35 and 32. Our GRANDsons are a baby, and barely a toddler -- the little man turns 4 in a few months.

Time flies on a micro level, too. We have plans today to drive to North Miami to fetch the little man at school, take him for some Halloween shopping, and then drop him home. D2, stuck in her apartment while her Jeep is in the shop, is coming along with us.

I texted Wifey at 12:30 to tell her we were leaving at 2;30. As a young man, 2 hours was a long wait. Now it's nearly 1:30 and I'll have to remind Wifey to come in and get ready soon. She flies though time like it's nobody's business -- she can spend 5 hours outside cleaning out the rock beds -- a form of meditation for her, I guess, and think she was away for an hour, tops.

I read an essay at 3 this morning during my nightly sleep break. I typically fall asleep at 11 or so, and am up at 3 to pee (happy that it's only a once per night urge) and then it takes me an hour or so to fall back asleep. I know good sleep hygiene demands NO screens, but I can't resist, and usually read some dry NY Times type essays. This was by Roger Rosenblatt, entitled "What They Don't Tell You About Getting Old," and he talked a lot about the difficulty in getting in and out of taxis, and how EVERY week he and his wife either have a doctor's appointment, are making one, or talking about one.

Last week I saw both an eye doc and urologist. 

But there is definitely a change in the movement of time. Months become days, and hours become minutes.

Clearly, the only thing that makes sense is to savor the moments -- as fast as they pass.

I bought some tickets for a concert in November. It seems it will be here any day now.