I am knocking on the glass. I am making eye contact. You see me and I see you. But like a wise poetic old friend of mine has pointed out, “It’s coming from the feel that it ain’t exactly real, or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there.” Lately, this has been a problem for me.
I was 11 and an old man told me he could never sleep past 5 in the morning. He accepted this and just moved on. You could count on him when the sun rose each day. Whether it was his paper, his coffee, or a donut, he was there. He told me that he would get up every morning and open the newspaper to the obituaries page. If his name was not there, he knew it was ok to go get coffee. That was so long ago. I miss him.
Back then, we all owned our respective ages. What I did not know was this was only a delusion of time on me. I should have known better. There was a blowback effect one afternoon on that high deck on Oleander St in Port Aransas. He gazed off towards Alister St where we could hear the sounds of a little league game intensely being played at the ball field. Friends and parents alike watch their player living in a moment that I am pretty sure will last forever, and yet disappear in a flash.
“You know”, my Grandfather said quietly, “when I hear that sound, it takes me right back to when I was a boy, playing baseball with my brothers. We were a whole team ourselves. The funny thing is, I SWEAR that was just last summer!” He sighed. I shivered inside because a shock wave went through me. “Oh no, does it REALLY go that fast?” It was a few seconds in time that I knew that the words shared across the generations had made it to the other side without the trademark breakdown.
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That moment was one of the deepest moments I have ever shared with him and it is one of those that I live to see unfold as the pages of the calendar turn like the opening credits of It’s a Wonderful Life.
You go through life and pretty much feel like you did when you were 15. It is in the contradictions of the physical world that we start seeing the shock to the system. There are some things we can do and other things that we cannot do. As a student of twelve-step programs, I know this and should use it to apply force in the right places. But when you have fought the current all your life, it is hard to just accept anything.
I think it will always be there, that born-to-fight attitude. I know no other way. I am sure it has kept me alive for the last 18 years, so it cannot be all bad. I often wonder how so much time has passed by so quickly, and then I remember. My Grandfather was not only trying to tell me about it so that I could somehow slow my ride down, but he was also trying to understand how it all went by so fast himself. It is surreal when conversations I had 40 years ago start making sense today. The understanding feels a little like surrender.