Columnists
Time and again
As I write this it’s Sunday and the last full day of summer. By three o’clock tomorrow afternoon it will be Autumn. Like many of all y’all, I’m surprised by how quickly time passes “when you’re having fun”. A much, much, much younger me couldn’t wait for the weekend. No work, no school, no expectations of accomplishing stuff and, most of all, WEEKEND. Now that my life is, essentially, all weekend, time seems to fly by as if there’s a deadline looming and I’m not quite ready. I have tried to slow my perception of time passage by adding boring chores to my day. I don’t think it’s working the way I had hoped.
Speaking of boring chores, what could possibly be more boring than cleaning and clearing a closet and dresser drawers? I decided it needed to be done (again) and I don’t think I have been more bored pulling jackets, shorts, T-shirts, blouses, socks, sweaters and undies out of those spaces. As I went through the mess, I’m wondering why the H E double knits I would keep a hoodie I bought in 1999 and haven’t worn since the first day I owned it. Seriously, why would I keep such a thing? I’m pretty sure someone born in the 2000s would pull that off the rack in a thrift shop and think they’d struck retro gold! Digging around in all of my clothing storage spaces brings a new meaning to time dragging on. Three piles had to be created. The “donate” pile seems pathetically small. The “keep” pile is also impressively petite. However, the “I’ll think about it” pile is worthy of a space on a relief map of the world. I can’t give a Norma Kamali sweater vest away, can I? My sister bought that for me in the later 1970s at a time when she and I were struggling to find ourselves and to find decent jobs, to find enough cash to buy a pack of Double Mint and enough coins to take our laundry to a laundromat. The vest stays for the memories. Whenever I wear it time stands still for a moment or two.
And if cleaning the drawers and closets wasn’t enough to make time feel as if it were slowing down, I have decided to have a serious look at the number of Corning- Ware casseroles, frying pans, mixing bowls, muffin tins and spatulas I have. I don’t anticipate a total cooking and baking stoppage, but when there are only two people in this house most people would agree I probably have too many “things” in the kitchen. The problem with a purge in the pantry is a gal from a big family never knows when all of the children and their children and all of my siblings and their families will show up for an impromptu meal. The last time that happened was in 2015 but you never know, right? So, the muffin tins and CorningWare have to stay. I’m not as sure about the number of mixing bowls, but eleven seems like the right number to me. There have been holiday baking sprees when eleven was one bowl short of what was needed. The bowls stay. Ditto for the spatulas. If the kids’ kids are helping then GramGram can never have too many spatulas.
In spite of all of my boring activities, which used to make time stand still as a younger person, I’m still feeling as if 2025 is flying by. Maybe I should just give in and enjoy every single moment as it happens and forget about the clock and the calendar? But, just in case, I kinda wonder where I left my third year Linguistics textbook. That there was one course that put me into a slow spiral until I went into a coma listening to the lecturer drone on about sociolinguistics, dialectology, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and historical-comparative linguistics. ZZZ
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