Fast Forward

by Stephanie Black

I can’t believe it’s June. My kids still have another week and a half of school, so the party hasn’t started yet, but holy cow, it’s June. Where did the time go? Didn’t we just start a new school year?

Of course, if I were to suggest to my children that wow, the school year just whooshed right by, they’d probably look at me like I’m a lunatic. Somehow I think the year went faster for me than for them. I think time goes faster the older you get. Someone explained this to me by pointing out that the older you are, the less a percentage of your life a block of time represents. For instance, if you are three years old, one year represents one-third of your life. If you’re sixty, one year is only one-sixtieth of your life, so of course it seems to go by faster. Okay, I’m not sure this actually makes any sense, but I do know that when you’re a kid, December lasts about eighty-five weeks. When you are an adult, the distance between Thanksgiving and Christmas passes in about the time it takes to sneeze. Hmm, maybe this time warp phenomenon has something to do with responsibility and how busy you are.

Time is a squirrelly concept for a youngster. My two-year-old is talking about Halloween, but she doesn’t have a clue when October is or even what it is. For all she knows, trick or treating is coming up next week (it will probably feel like net week to me, anyway). She wants to be a witch again (a nice witch, she specified). She didn’t actually want to go trick or treating last year, but she’s already gearing up for it this year. It’s hard to explain time to little kids, let alone a calendar.

It’s weird when you get old enough that you are the age you remember your parents being when you were a kid. But I like the stage we’re at in life. I have no desire to go back to being a teenager, fun as it was, or even to go back to being a twenty-something punk like some blogger I could mention. I wouldn’t mind having my youthful metabolism back, but other than that, I’d rather stay as old as I am. I have built-in babysitters in my house now! It doesn’t get any better than that.

I do think it would be fun to be able to take day trips back in time—to pick particularly fun or significant days in your life and go back and re-live them. In my time machine, you’d have kind of a dual brain for the event—you’d remember and know all the things you knew at the time of the event, but you’d also have your future brain and knowledge to give you perspective. That would be groovy. Then again, people would probably get addicted to playing in the past and their present would get all messed up and in the end, we’d have to destroy the time machine to save mankind. Someone should write a story about that.