Biding Time

For the last few years I seem to be just biding my time. Sort of moving from one memorable moment to the next, but the moments aren’t nearly as memorable as they once were and there aren’t nearly as many. Time is such a fickle beast, controlled by the things we remember. When we were children, we had many moments that were important to us and time seemed to move through a sea of molasses. I remember in Steinbeck’s East of Eden, he suggested that our lives are filled with moments worth remembering, that life was like a long hallway with coat hooks on the wall onto which we would hang those memories. The less space between hooks, the longer time seemed. Early on, it seemed like forever when we looked forward to those important events—a birthday or a Christmas or the end of a school year. Or, heaven forbid, graduation, that threshold leading to adulthood. And then the spaces between hooked memories grew wider and time sped up. One thing we oldsters can universally agree on is that life goes ever more swiftly the older we get. Now, I hook my memories on the rounds of golf I play three times a week. To help me bide my time till those days, I read and write, see movies, and follow favorite sports teams through their seasons. The Masters golf tournament begins this week, an event that I’ve faithfully watched for at least fifty years. But it doesn’t seem like a year since the last one. Tiger is now thirty-eight and, because of back surgery, will not be playing for the first time in more than two decades. Where did that young golf prodigy go, the one I can still see in 1994, raising his arm with a Tiger scream to celebrate making that downhiller on the seventeenth island green at the TPC Sawgrass to beat poor Trip Kuehne and win his second U. S. Amateur title? Where did they go, the twenty years between then and now? They sped by with too much distance between the coat hooks, and now here I am, biding my time. I see my life as a bobsled run, but three or four times longer than the Olympic run, a slight downhill at the beginning with gravity taking me down slowly, then speeding up in the middle, then rushing around that last turn and heading for the finish line. I don’t fear death nearly as much as I did a few decades ago. I could let go quite easily if I had to. Lots of unfinished business I’d regret, though. So, I’ll just go on living as well as I can, biding my time between my memorable moments. But oh how I wish the days wouldn’t go shooting by like heavenly debris during one of the Perseids showers.