Time Flies--I Can't ...

My dad loved to tell silly jokes--Lord knows where he found them. (The Internet was far in the future, and Dad never did get online--though Mom did.)

Here's one of Dad's: Time flies. I can't. They go too fast.

Think about that one. You'll get it. Took me only about, oh, a month when I was a kid.

Last night, our streaming over, Joyce and I were talking about how time has sped up the older we've gotten. A cliche, I know. But true--like a lot of things Dad warned me about--and which I ignored.

I remember asking him why he got up so early (he was a 5:00 a.m. guy). He said that when I got older, I would wake up early, too. (I was in the depths of my dark adolescence at the time--and loved little more than sleeping till noon.) I laughed scornfully. What did he know?!

This morning, I was up about 4:45, mumbling poems I've memorized.

So ... older = faster time. I told Joyce that during my thirty-year middle-school teaching career, I taught more than 5000 days. Five thousand days!

If you had told me back in late summer, 1966, when I started teaching, that I had only about 5000 days lying ahead of me, I would have wept. Or driven out to Arizona so I could leap from the edge of the Grand Canyon into the accommodating Colorado River.

And then those 5000+ days were over. In a heartbeat.

A few years later I returned to teach at Western Reserve Academy--ended up staying about ten years--retired again. And that happened nine years ago. The spring of 2011. The current seniors at the Academy were about eight years old then. In third grade.

Here's a memory from the Hiram Local Schools. I was in seventh grade--we'd recently moved to Hiram, Ohio, from Enid, Oklahoma. We'd been in town about, oh, six weeks

One day, early in my seventh grade year, I was sitting in study hall, a room that featured long rows of desks affixed to the floor. The teacher--wisely--had required us to leave an empty desk in front and in back of us.

Hiram Schools study hall room
up in front is the school library

There I sat, my homework undone (typical in my junior high years), thinking. And here's what dawned on me that long-ago day (more than sixty years ago!): My life in school is only half over!

I realized, you see, that I had completed six grades--but I had six more to go. From seventh grade to graduation is the same as from first grade to seventh.

And here's what I did when that thought struck me that day: I wept.

Right there in study hall, I put my head down and wept a few minutes. (Couldn't let anyone see me, for that has dire consequences in junior high!)

So ... sixty years ago I wept because of how much time lay ahead of me; today, I weep for quite the opposite reason.