Once upon a time I was a very little girl living in Vancouver. Time stretched out in front of me in a manner that was, well, timeless. I remember waiting, for instance, for Christmas to roll around. Remember that? It took forever. The end of the school year and the start of summer holidays? Eons.
Today I sat down to write in a café, and asked my companion, what date is it? November 3 she said. And I thought, how can this be? A blink ago it was Hallowe'en, just before that, Thanksgiving. I'd swear that Labour Day was just last week.
It's a cliché, or a tautology: Time flies. (Wait, I'll get my dictionary, yes, tautology 2. a statement that is necessarily true.) It used to crawl, time, but the older I get, the faster it flaps by. When my children were babies and toddlers (delectable and delightful, mostly) time crawled with them. They were infants for the longest time. Then they were teenagers, and though it was intense, what with all the hair-pulling and teeth gnashing (by me) it was also very brief. Decades have gone by.
This awareness is what drives me today, this week. Time flies, and I've still got lots to do. I could be 80 tomorrow. So, this week, I am working on setting up my office to function better. Stuff is going to be tossed. There are oodles of scraps of stories flying around in my office, unfinished, and I want to finish them, or delete.
Last year I was digging through my father's scraps and detritus and saying "oh, dad, what were you thinking." Twenty odd years ago I did the same thing with my mother's stuff. Now I can imagine my own children sifting through the debris, saying things like, "this paragraph's not too bad. Hey, if she'd finished that sentence, this might have been a story. Oh, here's part of her novel. I wonder how it was supposed to end?" And probably, "why's she still got this junk?" That'll be the baby clothes...
It's not fame or fortune I'm after, though that'll be nice, once I get some stories and a novel or two finished. Right now I'm just concerned that the kids not sit around saying "oh, mom, what were you thinking."
Whatever motivates, eh?
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
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1 comment:
I had a great aunt. Her name was Rilla and she was given to pronouncements. For example: tempus fidgits.
I thought she was crazy, and in fact she might have been, a little. But the older I get, the more I begin to suspect that this wasn't a malapropism, like her references to the "house of the Seven Grables" or something being a "fig Newton of my imagination".
As we get old, I suspect tempus does begin to fidget a bit. Or perhaps we're the fidgety ones. In any case, we'd better be thinking. Time waits for no one.
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