elizabethlevett

Thinking about time means thinking about math. Bummer. I’m not very good at math. Math is an absolute sort of thing, unwavering. I prefer things I can negotiate with. (“Yes officer, I know, but you see…”)

Sixty is coming up? That doesn’t bother me too much. Lots of cool people are sixty or more even. I believe I can still maintain badass status in the eyes of a dear and generous few.

But the math of it, the fact that turning forty happened twenty years ago – ouch. My first teaching position and our wedding were both thirty years ago. It’s been thirty-six years since I cut my hair short, dyed it red, layered on a ton of black eyeliner and came to San Francisco to start my own band. Graduating from college, braiding Michael’s long hair and talking about Kierkegaard as we sat on the beach at sunset, his ’64 VW van parked just next to the boardwalk – forty years ago. Forty-five years ago I almost got caught smoking pot in the girl’s bathroom at St. Joe’s High School in Atlanta. We were in there enjoying the acoustics – “Oh girl, I guess I better go…” when the janitor knocked. We ran out leaving the whole place full of smoke. After an eternity he ran out after us – “Somebody was smokin a reefah!” Thank goodness one of my girls was smart enough to turn on the drama – “We know, we know, we were scared you’d think it was us! That’s why we ran!” You had to be there. But forty-five years! Dang it all.

My dad has been gone thirty-one years already, and mom twenty-six. John, Dennis, Annie, and so many others. Didn’t we sit together so man times and wait for something to happen? We could swear the waiting took forever, the times of talking, eating, laughing flew away in an instant. Suddenly, in what seems such a short span, you guys aren’t here any more to wait with.

I was thinking the other day about how quickly some things happen and how slowly other things happen. It’s interesting. (Read: annoying, terrifying.) I was sitting on a little grassy hill (grassy knoll? That was 1963. Slow, slow motorcade. Fast, fast bullets. Fifty-six years ago.) Anyway, I was waiting for my brother and niece to meet us in Mountain View for lunch. We sat and sat there watching people walk by, watching cars, watching the sky. Took forever. The waiting, not the lunch.

This is when the math with its strident consistency gives way to the cruel whimsy of bent proportion. How quickly I realize I’m waking with aches I’ve just recently discovered. How slowly crawls the time between my second morning lesson and recess. How quickly flies a Saturday morning or a Sunday afternoon. How slowly drags a meeting after work.

How slowly we grow up. How quickly we grow old. The watched pot never boils. The long-awaited phone call never comes. It’s a long, long line at the Ferris wheel and such a short trip above the fairgrounds on a summer night. Silly math, silly time.