Time. We all moan about not having enough of time. I used to tell my children that they had too much time on their hands if they were getting into fights. My husband always has big plans for projects he will do over the weekend, but on Sunday night, we look at each other and ask, “Where did the time go?”
That is the big question of the day: Where did the time go?
It is not as though it slipped behind the bookcase, or joined the lost remote in the sofa cushions. It certainly isn’t hiding with the iPod, which my husband has AGAIN misplaced! Time seems to run away from us, like a small child who has just discovered he can outrun his parents.
Time is a fire in which we all burn.
In “Star Trek: Generations” with Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean Luc Picard (sighJ), he is confronted by Dr. Tolian Soran, played by Malcolm McDowell, who says, “Time is the fire in which we all burn.” Picard has just learned that his brother and nephew have perished in a fire, and this statement hits him rather brutally.
Is Dr. Soran correct? Is this the view that most people accept?
I don’t believe, or can’t believe that it is.
Time is the ticking of some form of clock, to be sure, but it is also an accumulation of life experiences, memories, events, and closely held loved ones. Time is a steady revolution of the earth around the sun, a myriad of glorious sunrises and sunsets, the rushing of the foamy tides. Time is holding the hand of my husband on our wedding day, and still holding his hand when we are old.
Jean Luc Picard, at the end of the movie when all action is said and done, concludes that time is much like an old friend who moves along slowly with us through our life time. I really like that conclusion. “Do not go gentle into that good night! Rage, rage, against the dying of the light!” as proposed by the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas is certainly an option. But, as for me, knowing that the closing of my eyes as a mortal being, and the opening of them to behold God for all eternity, I prefer that measurement of time.
Recently my daughter Mary asked me to write some stories about the growing up years. Being the youngest of three children, Mary felt like she missed out on some of the memorable events that the other two were privy to. Okay. I gave it some thought, and this one year stands out so clearly in my mind.
The year 1981 was an eventful year, making national and international history. Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President of the United States. The U.S. Embassy hostages, held for so very long in Iran, were released a few days later. The economy was plummeting all over the world, and unemployment was higher than it had ever been. Federal taxes were brutal. Inflation was legendary. We took out a second mortgage on our humble house at the standard interest rate of 16 ½ percent. We borrowed $10,000 which was supposed to provide us with income for the entire year.
We were property managers of low-income apartments in the Mojave Desert. Our tenants were struggling to pay their rent while living in old worn out apartments. Evictions were common; my husband went nearly every other day to file eviction notices at the courthouse. With rent collections down so low, my husband decided we would live on our borrowed money. Of course, he didn’t tell the owners of the properties that we were doing this. He felt this reflected poorly on him as a manager.
With a new baby girl, a two-year old son, and a five-year old daughter, our expenses were already stretched beyond our financial ability to pay for them. Each month was a balancing act and guessing game: which bills to pay, how much to pay, and how little did we need to just squeak by on a quickly emptying checking account.
I like to think of that year as this: The Year I Didn’t Win Publisher’s Clearing House.
Each year that big brown envelope came in the mail, and each year I had thrown it out in the trash. The year 1981 was different. I held that envelope in my hands and it seemed to grow warmer by the second. ‘Why not?’ I thought, as I tore the sealed edge. ‘Why not indeed?’
The envelope held a bundle of letters, stickers, and more than that, promises. “You could be the next winner of $1,000,000!” All I had to do was to fill out the enclosed papers, decide whether to subscribe to a magazine or not, get free mystery prizes, and put all those into an envelope and return it by a certain date. My hands literally shook as I reviewed all the offers, as I thought about ‘what if?’ that this meant. I ignored a crying baby, a brewing fight between the other two kids, and filled that return envelope, sealing it with a loud slurp.
But then, the mailman came and I found another brown envelope in my porch mailbox. “You have been selected to be among the twenty thousand people who could be the next winner of $1,000,000!” With disbelief written on my every feature, I ripped open the envelope, and there was the letter that explained everything. I reread it, again and again, looking for nuances of language, phrases that could be misinterpreted. Finding none, I pulled out the rest of the package of more stickers, more offers, and mystery prizes. I filled out the papers, declining the magazines, but staying in the contest. I had that return envelope filled and sealed before the postman made it to the end of the street.
I didn’t forget about it, but I did push it to back of the queue, behind cleaning, laundry, bill paying, and child rearing. As I said before, life went on. Then the water company came and turned off the water. We hadn’t paid our bill for the last month, $28.92. I cried, I begged, and I promised, but the water went off anyway. I needed to take cash down to the water company and pay the bill. There was no way to reach my husband and scream hysterically into the phone. We had one car, an old Ford Granada. So I paced the floor, waiting and waiting, and told the kids NOT to flush the toilet. They did anyway.
He came home and after listening to my ranting for about ten minutes, he said that he had some cash from rent collections, and that he would go pay the bill. An hour later the same water employee came out and turned on the water. He tried to look apologetic, but I knew he wasn’t. Everyone we knew was counting out their pennies and looking forward to seeing President Reagan clean up the mess of the past decade of disastrous politics. I made grilled cheese sandwiches (with day-old bread) and tomato soup (4 cans for a dollar) for supper. I started speaking again to my husband around 9 p.m.
The weeks dragged by. We went to Pic-N-Save to get shoes for the kids, and found some socks as well; they were ‘seconds’ which meant there were flaws in them. Well, the whole year was flawed as far as I was concerned, so we bought the socks and the shoes. Our credit card usage had never been so high, but we had no money, and a promise of money in the future gave us mental permission to use the Visa and MasterCard. I watched for the postman with the intensity of a stalker.
I followed the procedures, declined the offers, and filled the return envelope with the papers I had checked and double-checked. I caught the mailman before he got to the house on the corner. Hope was once again alive. Then my husband came home as I was wrestling with the bills, trying to see how close we could come to paying them all. He asked, in all seriousness, “Do you think we could get by with $600.00 this month?” I looked at his sweet face pinched with worry, and put my head down on the table and started crying.
The apartment owners came home from a long cruise and met with my husband to go over the collections and bill paying. When the owner saw that we had not taken a salary for seven months (yes, seven months), he swore and said, “Dammit, you gotta look after your family.” He wrote a check for the back pay, and told my husband in certain terms, “Don’t ever do this again!”
My husband deposited the check and didn’t tell me until the next afternoon. The mail had come, and I was holding the letter telling me that, regretfully, I didn’t win, but not to give up because next year could be my year. I looked at my husband as he told me that we had gotten paid back pay. We could pay our bills, but not all of them. It would take years to pay off the second mortgage (at 16 ½ percent) and all the credit charges.
The envelope went into the trash, and we hugged. Then I fixed dinner, spaghetti with meat sauce. I used a whole pound of hamburger, at 59 cents a pound on special that week. And, life went on.
