Contributing writer
I know that is a short title for a long topic, but it says it all: Time flies. When I was young, impatient and longing for my seventh birthday, time hung heavy on my hands. I so wanted to be older, bigger, better.
Every year it was the same, yearning for some illusive age when I would have more opportunity, more control, more freedom, more of life, and time moved so slowly. The days dragged by from one holiday, one birthday, to another.
And now I’m 10 times that age, yearning still for all those things — opportunities, freedom, life; but I’m utterly amazed at how fast time moves. I turn around and look at pictures from a year ago —it was the Four Alarm Chili Cook-Off for the town Christmas party. Tim and I both made chili for this event. He used a “chili stick” (I’d never heard of such a thing) and said with a grin, “I’m cheating.”
I made vegetarian chili and laughed because people didn’t know the difference.
“Was that a year ago?”
It seems like last month instead of last year.
My Mom used to talk about how time moved on, she’d shake her head and say, “Things change. Everything is so different. I think it’s time I exited the planet.”
She couldn’t figure out what the deal was with CDs. Where had all the tape players gone?
“What do you mean, they don’t make them anymore? Who can do without a reel to reel?”
She loved her little boom box tape player that allowed her to edit things she recorded and she was distraught when we couldn’t find them any longer.
“Does anyone wear dresses anymore?” she wanted to know when we took her shopping to get something new for wearing to church. “Everyone seems to be wearing pants!”
And then she’d sigh at how time flies, “Everything is so different,” she’d say. “Why do the stoves have buttons to push instead of knobs? I like the old ones best.”
Why did they hook your underpants to your nylons? She’d cut them apart.
“I’m feeling like mother,” my sister announced the other day when we made our sojourn to the big city for what we called “hunting and gathering.”
“What are you looking for?” I asked, trying to be big sisterly, helpful.
“I want some cardboard dividers — you know the ones that go from A to Z? I’m organizing the files at the office and would you believe, I can’t find those dividers — everything now is hanging files.”
I made sympathetic sounds.
“Who says your files all need to hang? Then you have to have those metal things to hold the hangers and buy extra supplies.”
She was truly distressed at this turn of events. All she wanted was something simple, something the way it used to be before iPods and Pendaflex.
“Cardboard dividers, with the alphabet on them,” she said, but the people at the office supply store looked blank. “They don’t make those anymore?” Darn.
How many things that I actually liked are gone? It’s the disappearance of perfectly good things that is so frustrating, just because time flies and tastes change and another generation or two has different ideas of what is normal and important.
I’m feeling the threat of extinction, a kind of dinosaur discomfort. I’m about to become obsolete, outdated, and even further out-of-step. I use a telephone, most often connected to something, for business, not pleasure.
I prefer looking eye-to-eye for a friendly chat in complete sentences. I use my computer like a typewriter with memory and send letters by mail with a stamp on the envelope.
Speaking of typewriters, for those of us who remember what they were, I remember my 90-year-old friend, Tony, hunting for ribbons to fit his 1942 model.
Hard of hearing, he was on the phone with some young whippersnapper attempting to explain to this child about red/black ribbons.
“For what?” they wanted to know. “Like a laptop?” I don’t think so. We shrug. Time flies.