Transition
More often than not, I’m acutely aware of time. It’s largely due to my mistaken assumption that I am operating in a different month than everyone else. This is leagues beyond the normal I-wish-it-were-summertime yearning. Though it’s frequently spurred on by weather or holidays, I spend much of the year writing the wrong months. On June 4th, I’ll write something like 3/19. Then I’ll have to scribble it out and wonder what, exactly, keeps my mindset perennially unseasonable. It’s not weather. I live in New England. There’s no such thing as seasonable weather. It could be 70 degrees and sunny or 40 degrees and damp. Both are regular occurrences in June. And it’s not just June that upends me. It’s all year long. I’ll say things like, “How is it April already?” and “It doesn’t really feel like Arbor Day.”
I feel attached to time as an abstraction while wanting to recognize its concrete signals. Maybe time knows that. Maybe that’s why time frequently rejects my advances. Maybe that’s why it races ahead or slows down exactly when I’d rather it didn’t. For example, today is July 4 and I’m not in the mood for fireworks.
DISCLAIMER: I love fireworks. I smile with my mouth open and laugh like a maniac through the entirety of the Big Boston Fireworks Production every single year. Honestly. I wail from delight over the proximity of explosions.
And yet, at the idea of having to walk over to Back Bay to see what are, year after year, hands down, the best fireworks of my life, my immediate reaction is: “I have too much to do. Can’t we postpone the fireworks? I’ll make time for them tomorrow. Or better yet, next week.” Except I’m going to PA next week. There’s no good time for postponing anything. Reschedule an event and I’ll refill my schedule. Guaranteed.
It doesn’t help that holidays always make me think of every person I’ve ever spent them with. People that are far away. People that I no longer speak to. People that have since died. I don’t understand how entire years pass and those details don’t get easier or feel any further away. They simply remain factual.
A friend that I lost this year told me in 2010 about the fireworks in his hometown. He talked about it with such affection that I went home and wrote about it (because I was and still am writing a book about America) and thought, when this book is finished someday, I’ll send it to him and point to that passage and tell him, “I wrote that because of you.”
But now I won’t get to do that. Being an atheist (and given that he was one too), I don’t believe that he’s floating around somewhere, waiting for me to finish my book. But that doesn’t stop me from wishing he were still here. He was smart and funny and a great deal of fun to have around.
I’m at a loss for him and for how to get past his absence. When I sever ties from someone, it’s easier. It’s usually a long time coming and I feel better for having done it. But when someone dies, it’s emphatically different. I keep thinking of Bernard Slade’s play, Tribute. Scott Templeton (Jack Lemmon) is dying and trying to accept that. He says, “When a friend dies, you lose a friend. But when you die, you lose all your friends.”
