When I was in college, visiting my grandparents, my grandfather commented in passing that he did not know where the years went now that he was older. He noted that when he was younger, a year seemed to last forever. At seventeen that comment meant nothing to me, but now that I am the age he was then I understand it completely. The length of time between third grade and fourth grade stretches in my memory as a long continuum while the length of time between 76 and 77 has disappeared in a nanosecond.
Another thing I have discovered is that I am revisiting events that occurred years ago. My memory may be jogged by watching a young mother struggle to get a resistant toddler into a car seat, and suddenly the toddlerhood of one of my children will sweep over me. And those events which took place years ago will seem more vivid now than they did at the time. Then I was just trying to cope and move on with my life, and now I can stop and spend some time looking at that young mother with time to understand and appreciate all she was facing and handling. Time has become softer and more blurry around the edges.
I pass a group of children at a bus stop waiting to be picked up for school. I can see three girls in my mind’s eye, dressed in new outfits, with the carefully chosen lunch pails in one hand, and the equally important statement backpack hanging from one shoulder. Of course I took a picture of them which I still have, but now I can look down the long tunnel of years from where they are today, back to that brand new day. I know what their triumphs and struggles have actually been, and I can feel affection for those three people in a different way than I did back when they were in elementary school. It is an encompassing tenderness that compresses and enlarges time, while at the same moment melting the edges of the past and the present.
The importance of turning ten and entering double digits, or turning sixteen and getting a driver’s license or (in my day) turning 21 and being able to vote are vividly remembered even as one approaches 80. What happened yesterday dims in comparison. Those long-ago years stretch out over an event filled period of years while the last decade seems to have come and gone in a flash.
If we seem to space out for a moment while in the family group, it may be that we are just in the midst of mental time travel. Something in the family circle has caused memories to flood back and overtake the present. Our bodies are with you, but our minds have gone back to a different time and place, which we are examining from another prospective. This often unrecognized gift of old age is one to be treasured. Just let us take this journey without worrying, for someday, if you are lucky, that journey will be yours too.