Episode #64: My Passage of Time

 While it is not my intention to deliberately offend or incite anyone at anytime for any reason, but this episode of my blog may accomplish that in the beginning as I set the stage of the opening of this chapter.

During the Presidential election process of 2024, this nation had (my personal thought) a complete idiot running for the highest elective office in our nation, that being Kamala Harris. She was so uniquely unqualified for the position to serve as Commander in Chief in so many areas, including but not only  that of an orator or spokesperson on virtually all levels.

She was inarticulate and incoherent at best and at worst she was embarrassing and very difficult to listen to as she spoke, especially when it came to extemporaneous commentary. This became more and more apparent as the campaign ramped up with more and more of these speaking events became more frequent.

As reference to the title of this episode title, in March of 2022 Kamala Harris delivered an infamous speech in which she referenced the passage of time four times in a span of about 20 seconds and then her ensuing commentary on the significance of the passage of time. 

And with that, I am through with the Kamala Harris reference and on to my story. 

When I was a kid I was always looking forward to the next weekend, Christmas, birthday, summer vacation and so on. As such, I cannot count the times my dad would say things like "son, you need to quit wishing your life away because you will grow up fast enough" and his other saying on this topic  "the older you get the faster the years will go by".

While I understood what he was saying as a kid, I could not comprehend the consequence of his content, because I had been in school my entire life and that I have always been a child.

As the years have gone by, I can attest that my dad was absolutely right. Earlier this month I celebrated my 69th birthday and fully realize that I have celebrated more birthdays, observed more Christmas', New Years, and see more sunrises/sunsets than what is left for me to see. 

As I reflect on this passage of time, I have come to this conclusion, the older we get, we gain the benefit of a longer frame of reference of time as it goes by, thus we are further away from those earliest memories and the present time seems to slip by faster and faster with each year that goes by.  With the benefit of about 65 years of recallable memory and moments of my life, I can now appreciate my dad's comment of how the years click by faster and faster all the time.

Since we will celebrate our 51st wedding anniversary in a couple of months which that in itself seems hard for me to believe, the last 5 decades have absolutely flown by. I remember with absolute clarity in April 1962 when my mom married the man that was to become my father for the last 45 years of his life. He adopted me and my younger brother and I am forever thankful for so much that he instilled in me. I was almost 5 years old when they married and we were living in the Oak Cliff area near downtown Dallas.

I grew up in a time when we had a television with a 16" screen and only 4 channels to choose from and that was when we lived in the DFW area. We would have had less than that when we moved to the country in 1969 if it had not been for the advent of UHF channels. As a kid for a long time we had only one car and somehow got by. Obviously no computers, video games, or cell phones. If we could not play outside because of the weather I would listen to the radio and look through an encyclopedia or the Sears catalog. 

I was almost a teen ager before we had central air conditioning and if our bikes had a flat, we walked to our friends house. We seldom went out to eat at a restaurant, and we would occasionally go out to a movie and that was a real treat.

We have been parents for almost as long as we have been a married couple. Had not our oldest son been killed in a motor vehicle accident when he was 16 years old in 1996, he would now be 46 as of March and our next son who died at 5 years of age from a childhood cancer in 1988, would have turned 43 in June of this year. 

As a catalyst to this story, the other day I drove by a house that we bought new in 1996, and as I counted up the years since we bought it 31 years ago and suddenly thought there is no way it could have been 31 years, it seems like only a short time ago, but indeed those 3 decades of time have come and gone.

I once heard time described as a river that continues to flow from our first breath to our last, and I think that is a pretty good analogy. It has its beginning for us at our birth then rolls along through our childhood which is gone in the blink of an eye, through our 20s with so many memories made and then further on into adulthood with other and different challenges that eat up the years and decades that follow. Some good and some... well not so good, yet all a part of this life. But just like the analogy of time as a river, it just never stands still, it just keeps on rolling by.

With all of the above said, I am blessed, and I mean blessed beyond measure in so many ways. To date, we both enjoy good mental and physical health and we have 2 healthy sons ages 36 and 33 and now have 4 young grand children who are now 5 years old, 2 years old, 1 year old and the baby is 4 months old last week and we love them all dearly. We have kept all of them their entire lives to this point, except they go home to mom and dad each evening and we have made many memories that we hope they will recall and treasure as they age and look back on their own childhood.

I worked very hard at every job I have had from 1975 when I turned 18 years old, left home and got married until December 2023 when I retired. At virtually each job I started at the bottom and worked my way up the ladder to achieve the the level of success I was aiming for. The vast majority of those jobs required me to work 55-70 hours per week, but still we took the time and made many good family memories and time spent together. As I reflect on those decades gone my, I truly would have changed a couple of things no doubt if I could but that is not a possibility and for the most part I am happy with the way I have lived my life. 

These lyrics from the song My Way pretty well sums up My Passage of Time:                                         

Regrets, I've had a few, but then again too few to mention, I did what I had to do and saw it through without exception                                                                                                                                    

In retrospect, what does your Passage of Time look like? Think about it and write it down, I am sure you will have good memories to look back on if you search for them. And the bad? Well they are there too.