The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, October 4th. It is the twelfth of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On the Long Game
We went home last weekend. Home for me, that is. Crystal Lake. Illinois. Chicago for a day. My nephew was born almost a month ago now. The first nephew. The first entrant in the next generation. We all came back. Frisch weht der Wind der Heimat zu. On Sunday, we drove into the city, the six of us who had not had the baby, and we spent the day with the two that did, and with the one that is the baby. And it was a wonderful, wonderful day.
On the way home, or maybe it was when we’d returned home, or maybe it was the next morning, when everyone was working from the dining room table before we flew out and Will and his wife drove back and Mom made dinner and Dad went up to Hebron, we were speculating about how long Michael and his wife and the baby (and the dog) would stay in Chicago. They live in a nice condo there. Their best friends are across the hall and across the street. But we assumed they’d want a yard. And we speculated where in the greater Chicagoland area that yard might be.
Will turns thirty this winter. So does his wife. I turned 26 last Saturday, as has been mentioned in this space. That’s the age my dad was when he and my mom got married and took the transfer from Kansas City to Augusta. They seem so grown-up in that story. They were. Grown-up enough to get married, to move to Augusta. My mom was two or three years younger than I am now. And I get married this Saturday. I’ve moved south from the Midwest myself. I’m grown-up now too.
In April of my freshman year of college, there was a snowstorm. This is not notable. It was not notable at the time. There is plenty of snow in Aprils in northern Indiana. But it was notable for me, because I was in a habit of visiting the Grotto every night before bed, and many of those visits ended with me walking back across South Quad while snow piled up around me. I didn’t know with certainty, but I could guess that night, in the black, clean air amidst the white, white snow, that this April snowstorm was the final one. And as the fifth or the sixth inch stacked upon the fourth or the fifth, I felt the sensation of being buried in the winter. Of being shut in. To continue to work. To continue to prepare. And it felt relieving.
I didn’t have summer plans lined up, and what summer plans I had were not the plans I had wanted. I’d taken to skipping three days of class a week, planning to learn through the notes, but the learning had not begun, and finals were approaching. I wanted to date someone, a constant desire at that point in life, as I’d failed up to then to convince anyone to really date me, but the girl I was seeing wasn’t up for that relationship yet, and we’d leave Indiana soon, and I hoped she’d want to continue into June (she’d dump me well before summer). I wanted to press pause. I wanted more time. I was fine with where the world was, but I wanted it to give me a moment to catch up—to put my shoes on and lock the door while everyone else was climbing in the cab.
That urge has not left me. The urge to ask the people to pause. To wait. To let me catch up. I’m not ready to be married, I think, or for my brothers to turn thirty, or for a new generation to rise in the same way our generation did. But I’m of course ready to be married—I’ve been ready for years now. And it’s time for the other things as well. I’m just not where I told myself I’d be.
This is the distinction, I guess. The deadline—the spring, or the generational shift, or the wedding or the milestone birthday or the move to a new state—is not a deadline of nature’s creation. It’s a deadline of my own perception. And perceptions are not always reality.
Nothing dictates where we should be but our own conceptions of where we should be. Nothing decides when the things occur besides when the things occur. We are not in the right place. We are not in the wrong place. We are where we are. We have done what we have done.
But this is not what we, or at least what I, tell ourselves (or myself). The week turns by and there are things undone, and the month turns by and there’s a project unbegun, and the year turns by and I never did clean out the closet, or sell that box of ornaments, or get the pageviews where I told myself they’d be. And so, I tell myself I am out of place. I tell myself I am behind. Behind what? Nothing, of course. But nothing is rather easy to fill in one’s head with everything, especially when one feels themself to be behind.
Time is running. It’s what time does. The clock ticks. The minute-hand moves. The calendar turns forward, never to turn back. But time does not tell us where we should be. Time only tells us where we are. And time, by that definition, is never running out.
Next week’s essay: To Emma, On Our Wedding Day
