TIME

Time. Inescapable, yet treasured. Mostly a welcomed pleasure, but often unappreciated. Every LIFE holds the hand of TIME as a child holds the hand of his parents. But TIME is a fleeting friend to LIFE, and LIFE is a fleeting friend to TIME.

          Why does a person, like I am, get more time, longer than seven decades of holding the hand of Time, yet some tragic lives are only allotted a few years and, yet the ultimate sadness is for those who only have days, maybe only minutes to live? At least their sadness is short-lived while my sadness for them lives on, private, hidden, endured but still grateful for the Time I have had. Why has Time given those short lives gravel, while I have received gold?

          However, my time had been fickle, stained with capriciousness, disloyalty, unfriendliness and sometimes volatile. Time wasted on hatred, prejudice, uncaring and unfriendly attitudes. How much of that wasted time have I wasted on those malignant darknesses of regrettable character and personality episodes?  I wish I could have donated that wasted time to someone whose life was too short, someone who would appreciate it more than I had. And yet, I still had Time to correct much of that negativity. I still had that Time to think, to change, to correct many of my mistakes, though I also wish I could have done more. Sometimes, in any life, you just cannot unring a bell.

           I realize how lucky I’ve been. I’ve made a few long-lasting friends, a gross of acquaintances—some of them gross-- and have a loving, loyal family. I’ve made some grand decisions that changed my life for the better, that produced rewarding outcomes. I’ve developed skills, especially hobbies that I enjoyed and a few that I still enjoy. I had the Time to do all that, especially becoming a teacher, spending thirty years doing something that I mostly enjoyed and was proud of.

          Becoming a magician, martial artist, writer of novels, short stories and poems, plus an autobiography and becoming a wood carver after retirement. Again, I had the Time to do all that. Would I complain about the bad episodes in my life? Sure, I would, and I did until retirement, but I wouldn’t do it now. I’ve had time to think about my life, to analyze it, it’s positives and negatives. It has been overwhelmingly positive. I shouldn’t complain and I try not to, but the ability to complain comes with being human. I often catch myself complaining and laugh at myself. I can’t stop breathing either.  I am at peace with what I’ve done my life, even the guilt that I endure about the negatives. At this stage of life, I can’t unring the bell on many of my behaviors but, at least the guilt has become mild. I grew up Catholic, but skeptical thinking and resulting logic have made me choose atheism. I don’t regret that. Nor do I show a negative reaction to anyone who benefits from their religion. I have no interest in anyone’s chosen religion. It’s not my business, unless of course they ask me to speak about religion. Even then I try to be a mild skeptic, cynic and use humor to take the edge off such a volatile subject. The choice of religion is deeply personal. Leave it to that person and wish them well, though I believe that that the best way to transform to atheism is to thoroughly reading the bible and stop cherry-picking the good parts while never mentioning the atrocious parts that makes up a good part of a not so holy novel written by many different, relatively ignorant desert dwellers whose own misogyny is overlooked. The New Testament isn’t much better, it still creates a god that is a blood thirsty tyrant and an extreme authoritarian who allows people to sin, then punishes them for doing so, but it does give me a laugh when I wonder under what authority King James gets to have “his” version of the bible?

I wonder about a lot of things. Where are all the teeth that billions of people, past and present, loose every day? They don’t decay very well, as seen in skeletons that are thousands of years old. In fact, the teeth last longer that the bones. Where did they all go? The same can be said of toenails, though they must decompose much faster than teeth, I suppose. I wonder, is a highway still a highway if it travels through the lowlands of a valley? And what percentage of our air is composed of human and animal fart gas? How long will it take Chinese farts to reach the shores of America? What’s the different composition of farts from different countries and cultures? The flatus must have a slightly different composition because different cultures have different diets. So does meat eaters compared to vegetarians, and vegans. Sometimes I wonder about such silly things until my train of thoughts cross the tracks to an exit where I find more serious musings. It’s a good change of pace.

More seriously and much more personal is me wondering how a person like myself got as far as I did and to have such a good life. My father only went as far as fifth grade and became a janitor, my mother barely finished second grade and was illiterate the remainder of her life, my sister quit school in the tenth grade.

I don’t see myself as a superior intellect, not with the shallow gene pool that I came from. My successes can be attributed to persistence, determination, and an indomitable need to succeed despite circumstances that might have been like an anchor pulling me towards the depths of criminality, and an immorally saturated life that would have shortened the Time that I have been so lucky to have.

Nor should I ignore the fact that I need Time to be alone. Not lonely, but alone, with hobbies and thoughts that keep printing across my brain and then sometimes end up on paper.

I sometimes act like an extroverted party lover and joke-teller, but mostly I’m a private, reticent person who does not like parties — with exceptions— or crowds, or too much noise, but I love humor and wish I has developed some skill in telling quality, funny jokes. I’m like my all-time favorite comedian, Red Skelton, who was the first to laugh at his own jokes. He was his own biggest fan, but people did laugh, often.

I am now sitting alone, in a quiet home, typing at my leisure. It’s an ideal situation for me. No interrupted thoughts to distract me as the thoughts and words flow easily like a gentle stream in a bucolic environment.

I don’t have many good friends, nor do I need them, though I do like to get out amongst acquaintances such as my friends at regular wood carving meetings. I’d rather have more stimulating thoughts than more friends, but I do have a handful of friends that I like to be with, partly because they put up with my awful jokes and weird thoughts, vocally expressed often to shocked countenances. Laughter is my antidote for episodes of depression and melancholy. During this Covid-19 virus pandemic I don’t get to see my carving friends, so I read, write, and carve more often. All my hobbies can be solitary endeavors. They are ideal for me, personally.

Writing about friends also brings to mind the sadness about close friendships. That’s when the person dies. In retirement that happens more and more. Outliving close friendships is a private but horrible feeling. Most high school friends are dead, man of the friends I made in my year at the TB hospital are dead—they were dying every week—many college friends are dead, two close friends died in Vietnam and now, my older friends are dying of disease and old age —which may involve a manifold of reasons. When they die of old age there is good and bad to be found, it depends on personal perspective. You don’t want them to suffer, nor do you want them to leave you.

Time to be a “home-body.” I like being home because all my hobbies can be done at home and my daughter and grandkids are only a few yards away. I don’t need to always be on the move, together with friends, regularly eating-out, things that most people enjoy.

I wonder if most people are happy, not that they can have a perfectly happy world, but are they typically happy, content with their lives. It scares me to think of how many people must not be happy. To put a figure on it might be more than scary, even damn depressing.

I college Psychology class, I tried to name all the variables that may lead some people to become imprisoned in a deserted, bland desert life, and all the variables that determine a person’s life will be mostly encompassed by a sweet-smelling, beautifully bright flower garden where happiness mostly resides. I couldn’t complete that task. It was a puzzle inside a maze, inside an enigma, all wrapped within a grand mystery. A problem to think about, but not to solve.

There are so many fortunate people, especially those who don’t have to work for the money they have; they simply inherit it. Nice. I wonder, do they analyze or just spend? Do they politely ask, or do they rudely demand? Do they think they are extraordinarily special people because they had nothing to do with earning the money they have available to them? What is it they mostly care about? Is it family, friends, business, more money, more power? Perhaps a combination? Maybe it is something unique, atypical. Would they ever think about the value of Time?

I think of my brain as an empty mental home, at birth. A home that I and everyone else has a chance to furnish as they wish—the question of life having free-will or being determined by another force, or another set of complex, or unknown variables is always circling the home, like a cloud orbiting the structure—fair weather cloud or storm cloud?

 Much can be placed in the mental attic, but nothing useful at the present moment, or it wouldn’t have been placed there. Usually hidden in the mental attic and desperately avoided, are those thoughts a person won’t, or don’t want to examine in their lives: their religion, their politics, prejudices, ancestry, education, luck, random chance, etc. Over a lifetime the attic becomes a depository of unwanted, unacknowledged fear of the truth or, at a minimum, what appears to be truth from a logical standpoint, not what is accepted a truth via parental indoctrination, education indoctrination, spiritual and political indoctrination, even the amazingly subtle indoctrination happening right before our eyes on the television news and radio stations, in magazines, movies, and advertisements, and other avenues of steering your thinking the way someone else wants it to go.

So, how does someone furnish their mental home? Are some of their rooms the same as someone else’s? Not a bad thing, if they weren’t deceived into furnishing it that way, though it must happen sometimes. Haven’t thought about it? How did their adult home get furnished, and with what objects and why those objects? What is in the cellar, that usually dark, damp forbidden underground space—especially in darkness— that supports the home? I had a nice work bench in mine, with tools and planned projects. My daughter rode a tricycle as I worked, and my cellar was full of happy sounds. But imagine cellars full of horror and terror. Each of us furnish the mental rooms in our house.

Hopefully, there are no haunted rooms soiled with the mist of shame that warps walls and the people who enter it. Don’t we all w ant rooms that are the rooms adored for their many wonderful family memories? It takes Time, much time, time that can sour the wine or age the wine to perfection.

Most of all, during my time on earth, I think of what major impression I would like to leave in the minds of my family, other relatives, and friends when oblivion comes to consume my corporeal existence? I will die, but the memory of me lives on in the memories of so many others. How do I want to be remembered? Certainly not for my youthful mistakes, poor attitudes, mean or hostile actions, nor my past insecurities, lack of confidence, miserable self-concept, anger, and more embarrassing moments that went uncontrolled and were unreasonable. Even now there are people in my past that will not remember me well, I deserve it. I regret it, but, like my favorite aphorism, I cannot unring the bell of my past. I only have control of now. Now is the only time I have power to act as I wish. At present I have no power over the past and the future. Now, and the series of “nows” that start right now and continue to the end of my future is what I have power over. How do I want to be remembered? Lovingly, of course. The first day of the rest of my life and theirs starts now. It all starts now. When is now? Time. Time. Now is my TIME.

Can anything be more true than the fact that humans are a mysterious and complex maze of thoughts and actions. “What you see is what you get” is a terribly naïve absurdity. What you see, in fact, is only the tip of the human iceberg. Much is hidden inside each of us.

Sure, I would like more TIME, but I can’t complain about all the TIME I’ve had, and I will accept when my TIME ends. Time for some babies to take my place and enjoy their TIME.

Unlike Dylan Thomas, I will not “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”