Time is a weird creature, sometimes stretching itself out across the couch like a slinky cat; other times, uncoiling like a jack-in-the-box, surprising us with its speed and agility.
With three days left before elections, I'd say time has been all cat and no jack, of late.
And, yet, now that we stand at the doorstep of The Big Day, I can't imagine life without cat fights and robocalls. How on earth will we "make nice" and put the partisan past behind us? I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that, when time has bent my mind in the past, I still managed to wake up and and get out of bed the next day. And there is something to be said for that.
November 1995. In my last month of pregnancy, my belly button but a faint, flat outline of the past, there were many days when I thought the pages of the calendar turned much too slowly. Tired of stretch-paneled jeans and pulsating nether regions, I was impatient for the next phase, pain and mess be damned. By mid morning on November 24, though, itchy from the dregs of morphine moving through my body, I reconsidered my impatience, wondering what the heck I was thinking, bringing another infant into the world. Time, it seems, had compressed on me, and I fretted that I might not be able to keep up with its demands.
Allison Shepard Holt turns 17 in 3 weeks. Miraculously, she seems to have suffered little from all these years under her mother's care. Time has been good to her, thank God.
May 2010 Mark and I are sitting in folding chairs on the Lincoln High gym floor, along with hundreds of other parents. The place is packed. The entire school has turned out for this morning's event, one in which every LHS senior is acknowledged, their scholarships and achievements providing the exclamation points to the final days of high school for these 400 seniors.
Time is playing games in my head, yo-yoing between its molasses and hummingbird bookends. I spy Eric, and light up, as though I hadn't seen him in years. All morning, it's like that--an accordion of memories, squeezing and releasing, and me just trying to find my balance.
November 2008 The last time we'd put yard signs out front was in 2000, when we were battling Amigo's Restaurant, hoping to keep it away from the Sunken Gardens. "Adios, Amigos!" our sign announced. It was one of many failed campaigns I've backed in my life. But it was a campaign well worth supporting. That same belief led my family downtown one night four years ago, where hundreds of others had gathered to utter that still-strange name "O-BA-MA!"
The rally was electrifying...and time slowed down that night to let me take in the minutest details of the experience. When my family finally decided to head home, a car pulled up, the driver popping open its trunk, and he encouraged us all to take a yard sign. I was downright gleeful when we got home, plunking that sign deep into the ground, my intentions now a pronouncement.
November 2012 Time slinks along these days, bogged down by bitterness, divisiveness, fatigue. Nothing is fresh in this campaign. Inspiration has been replaced by expiration, and I am ready to call "uncle." Oddly, this divisiveness is a sure sign that the pundits have been successful. Our failure to communicate? Further proof that the lines have been clearly drawn, even if they are not honest lines. I am ready for the long slog to be over.
God help those who win on Tuesday. It will not be an easy job, especially since so many have made it their job to turn a deaf ear to the "other," proud in their stubbornness to revile common ground. And I wonder--what if the "other" turns out to be themselves?
Time has a funny way of clarifying things. I just hope we're up to the task of tackling them, head on.
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