No point in wishing life away
/The Boston Globe
Beverly Beckham
Where did June go? And May? And why does February plod and March stall, while spring and summer fly by?
It's July Fourth - the quintessential summer holiday - and I still have winter coats hanging in the front hall closet. I haven't planted any annuals yet. Or weeded my garden. My window boxes are empty. There's not a single flower on my deck. My marigolds are seeds in packages. The lawn furniture remains in the shed. And I haven't even begun to make a summer reading list.
I always thought that all the page-turning in movies, where the days on a wall calendar flutter by, was an overly dramatic device. Time doesn't pass like this. It's slow. It lingers. And it did, for such a long time that I believed it always would.
For all the days of my childhood, time inched along. Time sashayed when I wanted it to sprint. Then there was my children's childhood, where it paused and slowed again, too. Where an hour in the middle of the night could feel like a long day that you wanted to end. But where the best of times sometimes dawdled, too, times spent in Maine at the beach, times when we were all together, eating, having fun, laughing, times that tricked me into thinking that life would always be like this. That if you slowed down, time would, too.
But it doesn't work that way. Time is like the words projected on a screen during a speed reading test I took when I was a freshman in high school. At first the words scrolled slowly and were easy to read. But then the pace accelerated, and with every line, the words flashed by faster and faster and got harder and harder to see. Pretty soon they were going by so fast I missed most of them.
May and June were like this. I missed so many days. I lived them but I didn't absorb them. They were like pencil on erasable bond.
I had a friend, Robert Cormier, who wrote the young adult classic ``The Chocolate War.'' He also wrote an essay about the words ``summer afternoon,'' how they evoked for him not just the heat and indolence of a summer day. But the timelessness of it. How even as a man with adult children of his own he could hear those words and go back to a moment when life was blue sky and warm sun and total freedom and all the time in the world.
My daughter came home from visiting a friend last week stunned by the fact that this friend's son is a teenager. How could this be? Weren't we just teenagers? Wasn't he just a little kid? When did this happen? she asked.
``Don't be wishing your life away,'' my mother used to say whenever I was moping around the house wishing I were old enough to do the next thing I dreamed about doing - wearing lipstick, going to a school dance, riding in a car with a boy. ``You're a long time grown up. Childhood isn't forever. Enjoy it while you can.''
I wished away too much of it. `
`Can't wait for the weekend,'' I hear so many people say. ``Can't wait for vacation. Can't wait to retire,'' I read on Facebook.
I can wait. I want to wait. Because a lifetime goes by not in the blink of an eye, but exactly like that high school reading test. Only it's a book up there on a big screen. Our own personal life stories with chapters you're so eager to read at the start that you want the words to gallop. Until you get to the last chapters. Then you want the words to slow down. You want life to slow down because you want to plant marigolds, and put away the winter coats and make a reading list, too.