Time's signatures

The moment we get in the car, she fiddles with the stations, gets the one she wants, sings along until she can't, then switches to another station to find some tune she knows.  A year ago it was Christian contemporary. No more. The diet is now is secular. She's older. When she left childhood, she put away those childish things.

It's noticeable in so many ways, these signatures of time. She's the oldest of three. When the other two want to do something, if she doesn't, she simply walks away, doesn't take the time or the effort to belly-ache about her little brothers, to taunt or to tease, just angles coldly for something else. There was a time when everything was worth a tussle. No more. She leaves them behind. And her grandparents.

It's as if she's in another world. She is. She's in her teens.

Her grandma says our granddaughter could have spent most of last night sitting out on the driveway in a circle with her friends, boys and girls, yakking--who knows what about? Life for the rest of us could spin out of orbit; as long as she's with them--her friends--she's in the world that really exists.

Just last week or so, her great-grandpa had to give up his car, his mobility, a bit of whatever little independence he still had. His eyes, at best, are uncertain, his hearing is long gone, his reactions are painfully slow. We didn't have to argue.  Even though he had it figured that driving to our place could require no left turns and mostly gravel roads where he'd meet no traffic and the only pedestrians were mourning doves and red-wing blackbirds, he understood driving was over. He had to hand over the keys.

It was Robert E. Lee at Appomattox.  He's 96 years old, but the look on his face I'll not forget soon--he was forlorn--a great word we don't use often. Forlorn--"pitifully sad, abandoned, or lonely," the dictionary says. If I were an artist, I could draw you a picture, but one is forming in your own mind anyway, I'd guess. 

Something is always over in life. The glass is really always half empty. One of my ex-students from years ago, announced to all her Facebook friends that she was pregnant. She's in her thirties. Yesterday, she said she'd miscarried. Breaks my heart as it did dozens of others who told her so. 

Dawn is rising later this morning than it did last week, and it will again and again from now until December. Somewhere in Saskatchewan a huge fire has clouded our skies for the last two days, dressed the world in something strangely gray and wispy. Lately, the night arrives more hastily than it did just a week ago.

Time is really little more than a fiction, Abraham Kuyper says somewhere in Near Unto God. And I know it is. Reality is eternal. Reality is timeless. 

But right now that idea doesn't much relieve sore muscles and an aching back.

Just a few days ago, I sat in a waiting room with my father-in-law, folks his age and a few escorts, like me, on four rows of padded chairs all around. A old man and woman came in together. He walked with measured steps that announce his intention not to break a hip. They sat across from us. She didn't bother with coffee.

Maybe she should have. In three minutes his chin was on his chest. 

The sadness I felt formed from the realization that I could nod off myself just as easily.

Time may well be a fiction, a novel with an end; but life is a story that's far more Dickensian than Hemingway-ish. Time's signatures are everywhere, over, around, above, and within hundreds of chapters.

But there is an end, which is, thank the Lord, really a beginning. Go figure.

I think I'll just sit here and watch the dawn.