Time in a bottle?

Funny how the first weeks of this little project have resurrected so many memories, from felonious coworkers to former golden boys. I had long since put OJ out of my mind, but I now recall gathering around a radio in the Green Bay offices of a cheese company to hear the verdict. (Where else could one work in Wisconsin?) A few weeks later, I left that job in order to move to Iowa, and I can still hear the straightforward Texas twang of one of the R&D guys as he told me to have a nice life since he’d never see me again. The secretaries thought that was cold, but it was certainly true. Life goes on.

Sometimes I play a kind of mental chicken, daring myself to calculate how many years ago something happened, seeing how far back I can go without having a stroke. Part of that comes from hanging out with high school kids all day; prying questions are part of the mutual anthropology project we seem to be engaged in. The students assume that I envy them and try to spook themselves by imagining the someday when they’ll be “old”. They don’t realize what we have in common, that in twenty years they may still be playing games with chronology just to see how it feels.

Most of the time, once the shock fades, I'd say it feels pretty good. An accountant friend of mine is not a fan of my little word problems; maybe she takes the numbers more literally than I. Cold calculations that imply too much about mortality and not enough about memory unnerve me as much as anyone. I'm ever on a quest for a cosmic pause button that would allow us to add experiences without subtracting time. As symbols of what matters, though, these figures are pretty satisfying: I’ve known my best friend for nearly 19 years. I’ve been married for 14. A friend to my collaborator here for 10. A mother for more than 9. I like what numbers like that stand for, and I know that's another thing I understand that the teenagers don't. Why would I wish to be younger if it would wipe all that away?

PS: Beloit College's annual Mindset List provides a good reminder of how or why young people may think or act differently than older folks like Lonnie.

Beloit College
Mindset List