Arriving at work one otherwise unremarkable day about a week ago, I was greeted with the completely puzzling discovery that my work shoes were gone. They were neither where I had left them nor anywhere else in sight. They just... weren’t there.
Imagine returning home one day after work to discover your house is absent - not destroyed, just missing - and you'll have an idea of my befuddlement. While I periodically change styles, I have left my work shoes in precisely the same place for over seven years without incident. My current pair is – or was – nondescript black and beginning to show the signs of a year’s worth of near daily use. Bought on the cheap at Payless, these were not exactly the pricey, stylish type of footwear that might whet the covetous appetite of some brazen work shoe bandit, yet neither were they so dilapidated that someone would confuse them for junk – not that anyone would single them out in the first place. We all have our shoe storage locations, and everyone adheres to the system. And while my coworkers are a satchel of characters that would likely be rejected as too unbelievable were they ever collectively pitched as a potential TV sitcom cast, I just couldn’t bring myself to consider theft as a plausible explanation.
Being the victim of a prank orchestrated by my friend Alex was another story. I’m always dousing the lights in areas he will subsequently have to traverse in the dark. My preferred location is the vast, intimidating boiler room. Buzzing with the din of machinery and freighted with danger, this area is not one you want to navigate without the benefit of sight. I get a good chuckle after my shift, thinking about Alex inching through the inky blackness with his tentatively outstretched hands, cursing my name while hoping the next thing he touches isn’t 5,000 degrees. You can call it juvenile - and you'll be right - but that’s our brand of humor.
So I began searching the break room, hopeful that I'd imminently find my missing shoes lodged somewhere nearby, have a laugh, and begin plotting my revenge. Yet I became increasingly discouraged by my lack of success.
What the hell…?
Staring blankly at the wall (an activity in which I am well-practiced), I heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and a moment later Floyd appeared. While not exactly my supervisor Floyd does outrank me, both in terms of status and seniority. Fortunately he’s not the kind of person who throws his weight around, but he does brandish the three Bs of intimidation: Blackness, Baldness, and Brawniness.
“Hey Mark,” Floyd greeted me happily, his shaven head gleaming beneath the fluorescent break room lights. We’ve worked together for over seven years, yet Floyd has never learned how to correctly spell my name.
“What’s up Floyd,” I said. “Hey, this is weird, but- well, I can’t find…” I started, my voice trailing off as my eyes dropped to Floyd’s feet, which were positioned squarely in my shoes.
“What…?” he asked, confused.
“Hmm. Do you…” What do you mean, ‘What’? You know ‘what’! “Um… nothing… forget it.”
“Okay.”
Floyd then began talking about this and that as he changed out of his uniform. No explanation or even a mention of the shoes was offered. Instead, I watched with a combination of bewilderment and horror as, one by one, he extracted his big smelly feet from the confines of my shoes. Judging by the sound made when his socks slopped onto the floor, I gathered his feet had been soaking wet.
Saturated, rancid Floyd feet had spent eight hours in my shoes.
Predictably, I was deeply disturbed and on several levels. I’m not the kind of person who hits the ceiling when somebody borrows a clothing item, but I tend to prefer lending out things like sweaters and scarves, maybe a seldom used jacket; not shoes that I wear daily. Also, call me old-fashioned but I do like to be asked first – or at least provided with a justifiable excuse after the fact. Thirdly, there was the obvious atrocity of Floyd’s feet being disgusting.
In the end I decided to put it past him; it wasn’t important enough to cause a big fuss over, just an isolated incident. Probably he needed a pair in a pinch, forgot his own, or something along those lines - I was willing to overlook the fact that my shoes now represented a biohazard zone.
Except that wasn’t the end.
The next day upon my arrival Floyd came to meet me again, and again I was horrified to see he was wearing my shoes! I thought, Jesus, WTF Floyd?! Again no explanation was offered. Nothing other than his maddening nonchalance. Furthermore, when he released my shoes from the horror that was his feet, this time he didn’t even return them to my area... but to his.
So now he’s completed the takeover, I thought. He’s officially stolen them! I was shocked into speechlessness. What could I say? Excuse me… uh Floyd? Yeah, did you just, like, matter-of-factly steal my shoes?
After Floyd left that night, I collected my shoes from his area and moved them back to mine. I hoped – I figured – that this would at least send a message. MUST send a message. Whatever he had been thinking would halt. He would show up for work and see that the shoes he had left for himself would have been claimed by their rightful owner, and he would be embarrassed. He would realize his mistake.
Alas, my hopes went unfulfilled. The next day when I came to work, I was infuriated to see that Floyd had them on again. He rambled on casually while my gaze locked onto his feet. You sick bastard, I thought, you’re not getting away with this.
When Floyd left for home, I once again removed the shoes from his area and once again returned them to mine; but this time I wrote my name in big prominent lettering on two scraps of paper and inserted one into each shoe. Check! Your move, Floyd! Unfortunately, this chapter took place on a Friday night, so I was forced to wait out the weekend before arriving at the exciting conclusion.
The situation plagued my mind all weekend. It became an obsession; I'd be in my kitchen Saturday afternoon spreading cream cheese on a bagel or standing in the shower Sunday morning thinking, What is the meaning of this business with the shoes? What is Floyd's deal? Who does he think he is that he can just seamlessly annex my shoes into his wardrobe? Is it possible he is that obtuse?
When Monday finally rolled around, I arrived for work 15 minutes early and made a beeline for the break room. There was no way he'd have taken out my name tags! It was one thing to wear an article of clothing under the guise of ignorance, but to remove the name tags would have demanded a deliberate action. Either way, I figured, I would have my answer. Either the issue would be resolved, with apologetic Floyd having realized his mistake, or the name tags would have been discarded. There would be no more ignorance, genuine or manufactured.
What I neglected to consider was option C, which was exactly what happened: that Floyd would defy the odds and continue wearing the shoes, only with the name tags in them. It was unbelievable. The shoes were sickeningly parked in Floyd's area, with my name tags - the ink smeared as a consequence of being mashed by something heavy and wet (Floyd's hooves) - against the insole. Motherf-
FLOYD!!!
Having already left the premises, I couldn't confront thieving Floyd, which was my initial inclination. But the more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself that I had to beat him at his own game; I had to continue with the charade. It wasn't even about the shoes anymore - I could throw them away, for all they mattered. What concerned me was teaching Floyd a lesson.
Okay, let's take it up a notch! I snatched the shoes, placed them in a bag, and tied the bag. I made a bigger name tag with my name emblazoned in thick black magic marker and affixed it to the bag. And I waited.
To be continued...
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Six Feet Under
There’s a porter at my work named Rolando, and every time I feel overworked and cranky I think of him. Rolando works seven days a week. What’s more, he works a double shift every day. Imagine: that's sixteen hours of hard labor every single day, with no days off and no vacations. Month by interminable month, year stacked upon endless year. Just thinking about it completely exhausts me. And this is thankless janitorial work we’re talking about: plunging toilets congested with strangers’ shit; vacuuming vomit and scrubbing the resultant carpet stain with a toothbrush; cleaning the foul public restroom; schlepping countless rancid bags of trash from the buildings; lifting the occasional blood stain, etc., etc. Factoring his commutes, the amount time that Rolando gets to be away from vile filth each day of his life works out to roughly six hours, time he must use for eating, sleeping, and sucking back the occasional Corona.
But what is perhaps crazier than Rolando’s mindboggling workload is the fact that he appears to actually enjoy it. Rolando loves everybody and everybody loves Rolando. He is one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met, never complaining or even allowing himself a disgruntled sigh; to the contrary, he happily fields my complaints, always offering a sympathetic nod when I tell him I’m bushed after my eight-hour shift (on the precipice of my weekend). He tells me that people such as us work hard at our jobs, and I’ll agree, thinking about how I just woke up from my two-hour slumber, and how this conversation is eating into my web surfing time. His English is a work in progress (while my Spanish is downright pathetic), so our dialogue is usually halting and awkward. For this reason I always try to avoid friendly Rolando.
This past Sunday morning I ran into the porter as he was shoveling out the plaza between the two buildings, a light snowfall tumbling from the sky.
“Mucho trabajo,” I told him, apropos of the snow. “Donde esta tu amigos?”
“No friends,” he proudly announced. “Only me!”
“Too much trabajo,” I said of his task, which was apparently to shovel the entire grounds by himself.
“No, it’s okay! ¿Amigo, cuánto nevará?”
I paused, the way you do upon encountering a phrase you cannot comprehend but understand a question is being asked. This was exactly what I hated, these situations. “I-I don’t know… No se…”
“Nevará… how do you say… ah, snow,” he repeated. “Cuánto?”
“Oh, how much snow?” I said, tremendously relieved. “Well, I heard on the news between five and seven – cinco a siete.”
“¿Pies?” he asked with a jovial smile.
“Si. Yes, about six. Seis pies.”
Rolando’s smile abruptly faded. “No… No realmente? No seis pies…” He appeared borderline panicked.
“Yes, yes, I am sure of it,” I repeated. “Six. Seis pies of nieve!” What was so hard to believe about six inches of snow?
Rolando gaped at me, his carefree demeanor gone. It was a look with which I am intimately familiar; the hopeless, desperate countenance of a man suddenly realizing the cosmic weight of what he now understands to be an overwhelming task before him. But I was puzzled as to why he found this so incredulous. Maybe he was hoping for two inches of snow rather than a half dozen, but it wasn’t like a few extra inches should make the difference between doable and insurmountable.
“Seis pies… Dios mio,” he whispered balefully, surveying the quietly falling snow about the premises. “Yo me moriré…”
“Well, good luck!” I chirped, giving Rolando an encouraging slap on the shoulder before continuing on my way, leaving the porter staring into space with a forlorn hopelessness.
It wasn’t until later that I learned my mistake: what I had told Rolando, in all seriousness, was that he would be digging out the entire complex not from under 6 inches but from under 6 feet of snow.
No wonder he looked so distraught.
While he had to have been positively ecstatic when the snowfall finally petered out that afternoon – leaving behind merely those predicted six inches – I couldn’t help but imagine the bleak thoughts that trafficked through poor Rolando’s head during the preceding hours when he was charged with work that, even for him, must have seemed downright backbreaking.
But what is perhaps crazier than Rolando’s mindboggling workload is the fact that he appears to actually enjoy it. Rolando loves everybody and everybody loves Rolando. He is one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met, never complaining or even allowing himself a disgruntled sigh; to the contrary, he happily fields my complaints, always offering a sympathetic nod when I tell him I’m bushed after my eight-hour shift (on the precipice of my weekend). He tells me that people such as us work hard at our jobs, and I’ll agree, thinking about how I just woke up from my two-hour slumber, and how this conversation is eating into my web surfing time. His English is a work in progress (while my Spanish is downright pathetic), so our dialogue is usually halting and awkward. For this reason I always try to avoid friendly Rolando.
This past Sunday morning I ran into the porter as he was shoveling out the plaza between the two buildings, a light snowfall tumbling from the sky.
“Mucho trabajo,” I told him, apropos of the snow. “Donde esta tu amigos?”
“No friends,” he proudly announced. “Only me!”
“Too much trabajo,” I said of his task, which was apparently to shovel the entire grounds by himself.
“No, it’s okay! ¿Amigo, cuánto nevará?”
I paused, the way you do upon encountering a phrase you cannot comprehend but understand a question is being asked. This was exactly what I hated, these situations. “I-I don’t know… No se…”
“Nevará… how do you say… ah, snow,” he repeated. “Cuánto?”
“Oh, how much snow?” I said, tremendously relieved. “Well, I heard on the news between five and seven – cinco a siete.”
“¿Pies?” he asked with a jovial smile.
“Si. Yes, about six. Seis pies.”
Rolando’s smile abruptly faded. “No… No realmente? No seis pies…” He appeared borderline panicked.
“Yes, yes, I am sure of it,” I repeated. “Six. Seis pies of nieve!” What was so hard to believe about six inches of snow?
Rolando gaped at me, his carefree demeanor gone. It was a look with which I am intimately familiar; the hopeless, desperate countenance of a man suddenly realizing the cosmic weight of what he now understands to be an overwhelming task before him. But I was puzzled as to why he found this so incredulous. Maybe he was hoping for two inches of snow rather than a half dozen, but it wasn’t like a few extra inches should make the difference between doable and insurmountable.
“Seis pies… Dios mio,” he whispered balefully, surveying the quietly falling snow about the premises. “Yo me moriré…”
“Well, good luck!” I chirped, giving Rolando an encouraging slap on the shoulder before continuing on my way, leaving the porter staring into space with a forlorn hopelessness.
It wasn’t until later that I learned my mistake: what I had told Rolando, in all seriousness, was that he would be digging out the entire complex not from under 6 inches but from under 6 feet of snow.
No wonder he looked so distraught.
While he had to have been positively ecstatic when the snowfall finally petered out that afternoon – leaving behind merely those predicted six inches – I couldn’t help but imagine the bleak thoughts that trafficked through poor Rolando’s head during the preceding hours when he was charged with work that, even for him, must have seemed downright backbreaking.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
30 Rocks
[note: a couple blogs I posted on MySpace are woven into this, so if a few parts seem familiar, they probably are.]
I’m hiding. Or so I’m told. The person I am hiding with refuses to go into details; has not explained who or what we’re hiding from; the extent of the presumed danger; or how long this charade will last. All I know is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to breath.
Looking askance at my coconspirator, I note her stillness, the vaguely madcap touch to her bright countenance. There’s silence. She glances at me, her gaze animated and intelligent, her mouth partly open in a frozen smile. Our eyes lock.
“Dadda, hiding,” she tells me. Indeed. Suddenly leaping across the bed, I devour her in a torrent of blubbery kisses while she squeals with laughter.
Then, despite Emma’s vigorous protestations, I retreat from the confines of the comforter and head to the kitchen where I put on dinner. Water to boil in two pans, while on the cutting sheet I slice avocado wedges. Into the boiling water goes pasta and fresh broccoli, respectively, and I open a can of corn. While I’ve been told this process hardly qualifies, it’s what I like to refer as slaving over a hot stove.
Luring Miss Emma into her highchair, I speculate about how much of tonight’s dinner will end up in her stomach versus the amount earmarked for the floor, jammed into the crevices of her highchair’s cushioned seat, or smeared into her hair in the manner most people reserved for applying shampoo. Fortunately tonight’s supper turns out to be trouble-free – or as close to trouble-free as can be achieved in the feeding ground that doubles as my apartment – meaning minimal carnage; at some point a wayward broccoli stalk careens into the rear of my head while my back is turned, but aside from that little incident foodstuff journeys mostly to where it’s needed.
“Bahf! Bahf!” Emma begins announcing as dinner winds down. Thankfully this is not a vomit alert stemming from my subpar cooking skills, as I had wondered when she first started doing it – as in barf – it’s merely her way of publicizing bath time. The fact that bath time tends to immediately follow dinner is not coincidental.
My habit while overseeing Emma’s bath is to sit on the toilet and read. She plays and splashes, sending the occasional rubber duck flying onto the bathroom tiles or enjoying a gulp of tub water, but otherwise is well-behaved. Perched there in the bathroom while boning up on my Spanish (¿Quieres jugar una partida de badminton?), it suddenly occurs to me, not for the first time, that the official completion of my thirtieth year is a mere ten weeks away. (¡Alguien ha robado mi juventud!)
Thirty years old…
It’s funny, the march of time. I never actually counted, but according to by best estimation it took somewhere in the neighborhood of a millennium to reach my 18th birthday. Give or take a year. Each childhood year stretched out interminably, agonizingly, punctuated by Christmas and my birthday, but otherwise offered little evidence that the hands of time were even functional. Bogged down in a vast sea of classrooms, teachers, homework assignments, and bus rides, it seemed to me that adulthood was little more than a myth, a fabricated condition existing only in theory, like Mr. Rogers's Land of Make Believe or any of my mother’s promises to take us to McDonald’s next week. Even as an acne-faced pubescent ne’er-do-well, the legal drinking age was a lifetime away – never mind the precipice of thirty.
Eventually I did become a legal adult, a naïve eighteen-year-old on the threshold of college, the world at my feet. Such promising societal models as autonomy, binge drinking, casual sex, and a host of other reckless behaviors still represented ambitions I might aspire to. The whole of my twenties, and subsequently, my entire life waited – stretching before me in an infinite sequence of blank frames. Since that time, nearly forty-four hundred such frames have been filled and filed away, one faceless day ushering in the next, and, like Emma’s sullied bathwater, my youth receded into the void of the bygone. I’m not saying that I’m terribly old, mind you (I can hear the symphony of tiny violins being played by those far older than I) but the passage of time only seems to hasten as your years progress, meaning I could be on the back nine of my life the next time I open my eyes – Emma having gone from darling little covert ops girl to gangly preteen who thinks of her parents as irritating fossils put on earth to scrutinize her every move.
I first noticed the shift when I did reach 18 – a slight but perceptible acceleration in the calendar’s pace as the next few years ticked by a little faster than they always had. And then I hit 21 and something oxidized – kicking life into overdrive – and in the blink of an eye, the rest of the decade rushed past.
You're having drinks with your friends one night after work, blissfully putting the roar in your twenties, and suddenly you wake up and you're married; you find yourself taking your daughter (your insanely adorable daughter, but still, your daughter) to the park, watching her toddle around unsteadily like a little drunk, picking dandelions, worrying rocks, and exhuming crack pipes, and you wonder exactly what happened to those years. They obviously had to have occurred… right?
I met my bartender friend Bill when I was 21 and working at a downtown Boston hotel. He was 31, and at the time manned the role of that older, ostensibly life-savvy friend whose default coolness arises purely from his age and a presumed talent for bar-hopping and seducing women – the twin pillars at the nexus of any red-blooded American male’s early adulthood. Several years went by, and it occurred to me that Bill was kind of old to still be patronizing bars geared toward twenty-somethings and hitting on young women he could conceivably have sired. Bill recently turned forty. Not only is this a worrisome age for someone I associate with on a friend level to have encountered, but means I am now the old Bill. Yikes.
Another startling insight regarding the aging process is evident when you wistfully think back to some of the things you used to do – not in a when you were a kid sense, but in a also as an adult way. Having nostalgia for activities that occurred after your twenty-third birthday is a surefire way to feel the whoosh of years whizzing on past. Not that I’d trade my current life for any of the riffraff that lassoed my early adulthood, but at times it’s tricky not to reminisce about my pre-matrimony misadventures and not feel just a muted twinge of longing: leaving work to meet up with friends – the bar scene set firmly in our crosshairs – ducking into warm pubs on frosty winter nights or lounging on outdoor patios during summer months – debating, discussing, and snickering while a series of cocktails disappeared one by one. At the time this was all routine, completely unremarkable, just that week’s edition of nursing a few brews and taking in the city. Now those times are glazed with a fine coat of melancholy – for the most part vanquished to the recesses of memory. I can't exactly determine whether those nights seem nostalgia-worthy because the lens of time has framed them with some sort of perspective, or simply because I can't partake like I used to.
And what about those partying years, countless nights spent diligently vandalizing my brain until all hours of the night? When is that debt coming up? Oh, it was all fun and blackouts back then, but like the work of a patient creditor skulking in the shadows, there was a balance being accrued; I feel like I should be getting a collections notice from my intellect any day now demanding payment on a past due brain cell charge.
The flipside to that coin being that if you don't move on at some point, you're liable to find yourself destined to live the fairly unrewarding life of a devoted barfly, eventually coming to wonder why you're the only sixty-year-old still bar-hopping. Who wants that? Beside Bill, I mean.
It all sounds depressing, but I don’t see it like that. Memories are fun; helpful even. Enriching, you could argue. What concerns me most isn’t the past, but the future. If the previous decade could evaporate so quickly, there’s no reason to assume that things will slow down in the next. If the pattern I’ve observed so far is any indication, they may in fact speed up, and the very next thing I know I’ll be 80. Then I’ll really be in trouble.
So as Emma splish-splashed and took a bath, all upon that Saturday night, I resolved to be more industrious with my time; use it more productively. If the prime of my life was going to be vacuumed up at warp speed, I at least wanted to have done a few things I could later marvel at, once I’m a cantankerous old coot sipping scotch in the kitchen. I wanted a few more memories I could dredge up and pine for. Moreover, I wanted to be able to identify what those future yearnings would be as they happened, so I could relish them in real-time.
The trouble is, if you were to collect all the new leaves I’ve endeavored to turn over at one time or another in my past, your yield would guarantee a lifetime of raking. I’m forever making and aborting my resolutions, each one invariably lost in an ocean of diaper changes and fantasy football. The only event that managed to evacuate my most deeply entrenched vices was the birth of my daughter. Apparently nothing short of human life itself is enough to significantly motivate me, and I can’t very well go around fathering a child every time I decide to establish a good habit.
What I needed was a clear-cut solution, a focal point. In the not-too-distant past I was talking to an older gent at work, the kind of seasoned gomer you’d expect could proffer some insight on things like elapsed time, and how to use your years judiciously.
“The older I get, the faster time seems to go by,” I told him, hoping to extract a pearl or two of sage advice.
He scratched his head and examined a liver stain on the back of his hand. “Yeah.”
So far his advice really sucked, but I decided to press onward. Prod him a little. I said, “I used to know a coworker who said he regretted not using his years more wisely.”
“That’s terrible,” the gent said, slightly accusatory, as if I myself had had something to do with it. “You don’t want to have regrets.”
“Right.”
“You should learn from your mistakes.”
“Interesting… Mistakes, huh?”
“Sins.”
“Sins…?”
“Son, what’s the role of Jesus Christ in your life?” he asked unexpectedly, signifying the conclusion of our treasured one-on-one.
It wasn’t until much later, watching Emma narrate a gibberish conversation between a rubber duck and a rubber seal in the bath, when it struck me: if I wanted to do something special that I could later look back and marvel at, something worthy of a faraway gaze, one thing I could do was to savor this moment. And not only this one: din din, bath time, and those stakeouts beneath the comforter, too. Painting and jaunts to the park. Playing. These little routine moments with Emma will be the future of my nostalgia, won’t they? Someday I’ll long for my thirties, when Emma was a mischievous little munchkin and the world was a simpler place. So here’s to enjoying the present, and hey; all in all it’s been a pretty entertaining thirty years – I’m looking forward what awaits in the next thirty.
Fortunately for me, absurdity is timeless.
I’m hiding. Or so I’m told. The person I am hiding with refuses to go into details; has not explained who or what we’re hiding from; the extent of the presumed danger; or how long this charade will last. All I know is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to breath.
Looking askance at my coconspirator, I note her stillness, the vaguely madcap touch to her bright countenance. There’s silence. She glances at me, her gaze animated and intelligent, her mouth partly open in a frozen smile. Our eyes lock.
“Dadda, hiding,” she tells me. Indeed. Suddenly leaping across the bed, I devour her in a torrent of blubbery kisses while she squeals with laughter.
Then, despite Emma’s vigorous protestations, I retreat from the confines of the comforter and head to the kitchen where I put on dinner. Water to boil in two pans, while on the cutting sheet I slice avocado wedges. Into the boiling water goes pasta and fresh broccoli, respectively, and I open a can of corn. While I’ve been told this process hardly qualifies, it’s what I like to refer as slaving over a hot stove.
Luring Miss Emma into her highchair, I speculate about how much of tonight’s dinner will end up in her stomach versus the amount earmarked for the floor, jammed into the crevices of her highchair’s cushioned seat, or smeared into her hair in the manner most people reserved for applying shampoo. Fortunately tonight’s supper turns out to be trouble-free – or as close to trouble-free as can be achieved in the feeding ground that doubles as my apartment – meaning minimal carnage; at some point a wayward broccoli stalk careens into the rear of my head while my back is turned, but aside from that little incident foodstuff journeys mostly to where it’s needed.
“Bahf! Bahf!” Emma begins announcing as dinner winds down. Thankfully this is not a vomit alert stemming from my subpar cooking skills, as I had wondered when she first started doing it – as in barf – it’s merely her way of publicizing bath time. The fact that bath time tends to immediately follow dinner is not coincidental.
My habit while overseeing Emma’s bath is to sit on the toilet and read. She plays and splashes, sending the occasional rubber duck flying onto the bathroom tiles or enjoying a gulp of tub water, but otherwise is well-behaved. Perched there in the bathroom while boning up on my Spanish (¿Quieres jugar una partida de badminton?), it suddenly occurs to me, not for the first time, that the official completion of my thirtieth year is a mere ten weeks away. (¡Alguien ha robado mi juventud!)
Thirty years old…
It’s funny, the march of time. I never actually counted, but according to by best estimation it took somewhere in the neighborhood of a millennium to reach my 18th birthday. Give or take a year. Each childhood year stretched out interminably, agonizingly, punctuated by Christmas and my birthday, but otherwise offered little evidence that the hands of time were even functional. Bogged down in a vast sea of classrooms, teachers, homework assignments, and bus rides, it seemed to me that adulthood was little more than a myth, a fabricated condition existing only in theory, like Mr. Rogers's Land of Make Believe or any of my mother’s promises to take us to McDonald’s next week. Even as an acne-faced pubescent ne’er-do-well, the legal drinking age was a lifetime away – never mind the precipice of thirty.
Eventually I did become a legal adult, a naïve eighteen-year-old on the threshold of college, the world at my feet. Such promising societal models as autonomy, binge drinking, casual sex, and a host of other reckless behaviors still represented ambitions I might aspire to. The whole of my twenties, and subsequently, my entire life waited – stretching before me in an infinite sequence of blank frames. Since that time, nearly forty-four hundred such frames have been filled and filed away, one faceless day ushering in the next, and, like Emma’s sullied bathwater, my youth receded into the void of the bygone. I’m not saying that I’m terribly old, mind you (I can hear the symphony of tiny violins being played by those far older than I) but the passage of time only seems to hasten as your years progress, meaning I could be on the back nine of my life the next time I open my eyes – Emma having gone from darling little covert ops girl to gangly preteen who thinks of her parents as irritating fossils put on earth to scrutinize her every move.
I first noticed the shift when I did reach 18 – a slight but perceptible acceleration in the calendar’s pace as the next few years ticked by a little faster than they always had. And then I hit 21 and something oxidized – kicking life into overdrive – and in the blink of an eye, the rest of the decade rushed past.
You're having drinks with your friends one night after work, blissfully putting the roar in your twenties, and suddenly you wake up and you're married; you find yourself taking your daughter (your insanely adorable daughter, but still, your daughter) to the park, watching her toddle around unsteadily like a little drunk, picking dandelions, worrying rocks, and exhuming crack pipes, and you wonder exactly what happened to those years. They obviously had to have occurred… right?
I met my bartender friend Bill when I was 21 and working at a downtown Boston hotel. He was 31, and at the time manned the role of that older, ostensibly life-savvy friend whose default coolness arises purely from his age and a presumed talent for bar-hopping and seducing women – the twin pillars at the nexus of any red-blooded American male’s early adulthood. Several years went by, and it occurred to me that Bill was kind of old to still be patronizing bars geared toward twenty-somethings and hitting on young women he could conceivably have sired. Bill recently turned forty. Not only is this a worrisome age for someone I associate with on a friend level to have encountered, but means I am now the old Bill. Yikes.
Another startling insight regarding the aging process is evident when you wistfully think back to some of the things you used to do – not in a when you were a kid sense, but in a also as an adult way. Having nostalgia for activities that occurred after your twenty-third birthday is a surefire way to feel the whoosh of years whizzing on past. Not that I’d trade my current life for any of the riffraff that lassoed my early adulthood, but at times it’s tricky not to reminisce about my pre-matrimony misadventures and not feel just a muted twinge of longing: leaving work to meet up with friends – the bar scene set firmly in our crosshairs – ducking into warm pubs on frosty winter nights or lounging on outdoor patios during summer months – debating, discussing, and snickering while a series of cocktails disappeared one by one. At the time this was all routine, completely unremarkable, just that week’s edition of nursing a few brews and taking in the city. Now those times are glazed with a fine coat of melancholy – for the most part vanquished to the recesses of memory. I can't exactly determine whether those nights seem nostalgia-worthy because the lens of time has framed them with some sort of perspective, or simply because I can't partake like I used to.
And what about those partying years, countless nights spent diligently vandalizing my brain until all hours of the night? When is that debt coming up? Oh, it was all fun and blackouts back then, but like the work of a patient creditor skulking in the shadows, there was a balance being accrued; I feel like I should be getting a collections notice from my intellect any day now demanding payment on a past due brain cell charge.
The flipside to that coin being that if you don't move on at some point, you're liable to find yourself destined to live the fairly unrewarding life of a devoted barfly, eventually coming to wonder why you're the only sixty-year-old still bar-hopping. Who wants that? Beside Bill, I mean.
It all sounds depressing, but I don’t see it like that. Memories are fun; helpful even. Enriching, you could argue. What concerns me most isn’t the past, but the future. If the previous decade could evaporate so quickly, there’s no reason to assume that things will slow down in the next. If the pattern I’ve observed so far is any indication, they may in fact speed up, and the very next thing I know I’ll be 80. Then I’ll really be in trouble.
So as Emma splish-splashed and took a bath, all upon that Saturday night, I resolved to be more industrious with my time; use it more productively. If the prime of my life was going to be vacuumed up at warp speed, I at least wanted to have done a few things I could later marvel at, once I’m a cantankerous old coot sipping scotch in the kitchen. I wanted a few more memories I could dredge up and pine for. Moreover, I wanted to be able to identify what those future yearnings would be as they happened, so I could relish them in real-time.
The trouble is, if you were to collect all the new leaves I’ve endeavored to turn over at one time or another in my past, your yield would guarantee a lifetime of raking. I’m forever making and aborting my resolutions, each one invariably lost in an ocean of diaper changes and fantasy football. The only event that managed to evacuate my most deeply entrenched vices was the birth of my daughter. Apparently nothing short of human life itself is enough to significantly motivate me, and I can’t very well go around fathering a child every time I decide to establish a good habit.
What I needed was a clear-cut solution, a focal point. In the not-too-distant past I was talking to an older gent at work, the kind of seasoned gomer you’d expect could proffer some insight on things like elapsed time, and how to use your years judiciously.
“The older I get, the faster time seems to go by,” I told him, hoping to extract a pearl or two of sage advice.
He scratched his head and examined a liver stain on the back of his hand. “Yeah.”
So far his advice really sucked, but I decided to press onward. Prod him a little. I said, “I used to know a coworker who said he regretted not using his years more wisely.”
“That’s terrible,” the gent said, slightly accusatory, as if I myself had had something to do with it. “You don’t want to have regrets.”
“Right.”
“You should learn from your mistakes.”
“Interesting… Mistakes, huh?”
“Sins.”
“Sins…?”
“Son, what’s the role of Jesus Christ in your life?” he asked unexpectedly, signifying the conclusion of our treasured one-on-one.
It wasn’t until much later, watching Emma narrate a gibberish conversation between a rubber duck and a rubber seal in the bath, when it struck me: if I wanted to do something special that I could later look back and marvel at, something worthy of a faraway gaze, one thing I could do was to savor this moment. And not only this one: din din, bath time, and those stakeouts beneath the comforter, too. Painting and jaunts to the park. Playing. These little routine moments with Emma will be the future of my nostalgia, won’t they? Someday I’ll long for my thirties, when Emma was a mischievous little munchkin and the world was a simpler place. So here’s to enjoying the present, and hey; all in all it’s been a pretty entertaining thirty years – I’m looking forward what awaits in the next thirty.
Fortunately for me, absurdity is timeless.
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