I remember hearing the national anthem of older people as a kid – how so much of the world and themselves had changed, how time seemed to keep moving faster. At whatever age I would hear this, I would immediately think I could relate. After all, the difference between being four years old and eight was monumental; the difference between who I was at eight seemed eons apart from where I found myself at sixteen. I was sure this trajectory was permanent.
Then I started to notice the summers between grades feeling shorter. However, this wasn’t the typical ‘I don’t want to go back to school’ mindset. After all, I had always looked at that next grade or school with eager anticipation. This was more of a small surprise that the season or month which had just passed felt somehow closer, while the new month had managed to sneak up on me. The bookends of what represented immediate past and future seemed to telescope like a Chinese wax paper yo-yo.
I was in for an even ruder awakening as my college years lost the rhythm of school, with predictable breaks and vacations. I was working during the school year and during the summers. I was enrolled as a full-time student every term, including summer. It all started to run together. Suddenly, with schooling completed, I still knew no boundaries between work and play. Perhaps I had no separation of professional identity from personal passions, because I had yet to learn how to play. I only knew how to be an over-the-top worker bee in my twenties.
And I think that’s when I noticed the next layer of how time moves. On the job I itched to be given more responsibility, perhaps even an actual human to manage and be in charge of – even though I had yet to raise and train a puppy at home. I began dressing for each season. Dark-colored wool skirts and suits in winter changing to lighter suits and just a scarf tucked in to simulate a blouse underneath to make the LA summer bearable.
I enjoyed the change of decorations as holidays came and went, and griped with everyone else about how stores seemed to start putting items out earlier every year. But I would say it quietly to myself, well aware of how I was echoing the comments of the old people.
Job hopping in a booming economy for wages that rose with each new title left little time to notice exactly when the street banners showed glistening red poinsettias or a blush of tulips and bunnies. It was only on the actual holiday, like an enforced timeout for adults, that I would realize there were no meals, visits or special plans made.
Sometimes I could manage to scrounge an invitation to someone else’s family gathering by calibrating my response to the usual inquiries. The kaleidoscope of memories accumulated as the perpetual guest at continually changing tables was no longer sufficient. Each time I vowed to be the one doing the inviting and planning the following year. Next time, I told myself. Soon.
The readjustment to wearing long sleeves or the first ticklish steps barefooted onto the grass continued to mark seasons. I was startled to realized I had swimsuits in my drawer that had gone more than one summer without being worn once. Where did that time go? How had it moved so fast? What had been more important last summer?
Teaching brought a whole new perspective to following a calendar. How many lessons could I fit in before the next holiday? I continually worried if I was far enough along in the pacing guide, that holy bible of curriculum I believed in philosophically, yet managed to repent as a fallen angel each time I fell behind. Now time became a precious commodity – managing the waking hours in one day for grading, copying, planning and cleaning, summoning the stamina after long Tuesday staff meetings to make it to Friday afternoon, fighting the feeling of the steel traps that are young minds swinging shut on the last day of springtime standardized tests.
And then, gasp, it happened again. I did that thing that the old people find the time to do. I realized that I had started following weather reports of all kinds. Hourly predictions on the wind speed, daily estimates of peak temperature, the increasingly early onset of sundown as Fall approached. It was a cyclist’s view of time.
I had finally learned to find time to play, well, sort of. Time to ride. Time to periodize training between races. I chuckled to myself when I first heard an old person comment on how all of the forecasters on the evening news were younger than him. Having been so used to being the youngest in the room – for business meetings, club meetings, presentations or trainings – I again thought I could relate as another kind of outlier. But, I also whispered reassuringly to myself that at least I would know what it felt like to be middle aged well before I knew what it felt like to be old. Yet, somewhere in those first few years of teaching, I stopped hearing, “…but you look so young.”
I don’t know when it happened, but store clerks had switched from calling me a Miss to a Ma’am and I never registered the change. I didn’t have wrinkles or gray hair. I didn’t have young kids in tow with me. I didn’t think I had changed. But I was sure that these check-out girls with facial piercings and bag boys with neck tattoos were definitely getting younger and less skilled. I caught myself wondering if they had thought at all about how it might limit their job opportunities when they acquired these nearly permanent alterations for creative expression. I debated myself on whether it showed the progressive outlook of recruiters or the desperation of employers facing high turnover in entry-level positions. And I nearly stroked when the unbidden thought came, “Back in my day, that never would have been acceptable.” The subsequent shudder could have vibrated dentures out of my head, if I had any. How much longer could I deny being one of those old people I listened to when I was four, sixteen and twenty-two? Oh, yeah, Happy 36th Birthday to me.
