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.