MAY 21, 2025 – Time. If you stop it long enough to examine it, you’ll see it as an interesting conceptual sculpture. The overall construct is a paradox: time is at once long and short; near and far; uniquely perceived by every individual, yet a common feature of our humanity; intangible in the moment but objectively manifest as in the faded paint on an old barn . . . and skin, joints and motions of an old person; unambiguously quantifiable by us but bafflingly malleable according to the laws of physics.
My dad once pointed out to me that from a psychological perspective, time accelerates as one ages: as the decades pass, each major increment of time—be it a day, a week, a month or a year—becomes an ever decreasing percentage of your entire life. This explains why at the age of 70 the days seem to pass seven times more quicky than when I was 10.
I think about this often from the viewpoint of our going-on-10 granddaughter. When my wife complains that at a play or concert she (the granddaughter) gets fidgety after an hour, I think, well, fine, but for a not-even 10-year old, an hour would be the equivalent of seven hours to me. Similar extrapolations apply to car trips, train rides, plane flights, as well as to the waiting time for Christmas once Thanksgiving dinner has been reduced to leftovers.
This warping of time between youth and old age applies to memory as well. Childhood memories are “baked in” better than more recent ones. I remember verbatim conversations I had in kindergarten, but the best I can do about yesterday’s exchanges is a generally accurate outline. Ditto books, sound recordings, and perhaps most mystically, impressions that people, scenery, circumstances formed when I was five vs. when I was 55.
The foregoing thoughts triggered just now one of my 65-year-old memories; a day in early summer when in my red thin-striped spring jacket and little baseball cap, I was out wandering around on our castle grounds (I imagined)—that is, our yard at the corner of Green Avenue and Rice Street in Anoka, Minnesota. A fleet of fast-cruising cumulus clouds sailed purposefully way overhead. Their unusual shapes and uniform motion caught my attention, and I craned my neck to watch the parade.
The air was cool. A front had pushed out the overnight rain, and with the aid of the wind, a determined sun had already worked its bright warm rays passed slipped between “tall ships” to dry the grass. I lay down—feet to north, head to south—between house and street and rested the back of my head against my palms. What I remember vividly is the illusion of the roof moving against the clouds. I was mesmerized by this view and impressed by two contradictory features of the scene: first, I knew full well that the house was fixed and the clouds were not, but second, I could easily convince myself that it was the other way around.
At the time—as it were—I left those thoughts where they were . . . etched into my long-term memory, as it turns out. I wasn’t old enough or sufficiently exposed to life to analyze or contemplate the experience beyond what I’ve just described. Now, as a much older creature, however, I can readily see the object lesson in that early childhood experience: the simplicity of misperception and the ease of self-deception.
At a slightly older age, I remember the feeling of adventure accompanied by the anticipation of personal freedom associated with summer vacation. This feeling accompanied the outburst of verdancy in the yard, in the neighborhood, among the big elms on the school playground; an emotion that grew with the passage of days in May, until by early June, I was mentally fully provisioned, saddled up and all set to ride out of Dodge and across the limitless prairies, over the sky-piercing Rockies, through the thirst-inducing Great Basin, up and down the Sierras and on to the horizonless Pacific. The long journey would take a long time—from one age to another, given my August birthday, and from one grade to another. As reality sank in, of course, it would be another season of Pee-Wees—one in which, as it turned out when I was going on 10, our team’s otherwise nice-looking bright red T-shirts with “ANOKA PEE-WEES” and a stylized young ballplayer on the front but on the back, the unfortunate name of our sponsor, “Marvin’s Beauty Salon.” In our town and times, Marvin’s promotion rendered the shirt unwearable in public.
Honestly, until I punched out the foregoing paragraph, I hadn’t given that T-shirt a nano-second of thought after it was cleaned out of a lost corner of my bedroom closet. Compressed through the prism of time, the memory of that T-shirt is now a reminder of societal change. Again, it’s an example of how time works on an impression from a much earlier . . . time.
Today the advent of spring and anticipation of summer prompt a narrower outlook for me than they did 60 years ago. The rest of May is spoken for. June, July and August are nearly fully booked. “Scramble” is the byword. The Fourth of July weekend is the day after tomorrow and seems to mark the midpoint of summer. (Back in the day, it was a milepost in the distant future, well over the horizon, yet when it arrived it seemed to be the start of summer.) When the last of the fireworks are spent, will there be enough of summer left to gather, split and stash an adequate supply firewood for another fall and winter at the cabin?
We hear about “living in the moment,” but that’s a tall order. The dictum exposes another part of time’s paradox: while artifacts prove humanity’s past and we can firmly sculpt an array of times, dates and events into the calendar of the future, the present eludes us at the same time it continuously . . . exists. How can that be? How can something be constant and perpetual, yet never retainable?
I’m tempted to say, “time will tell,” but both in and beyond the moment, that sounds way too glib.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
