In the same way that some people are prone to brittle nails or bouts of sinus infections during ragweed season, I am prone to bouts of existential horror about the passing of time. Maybe you also wake at 3 a.m. wondering — at the very bottom of the night — how it’s possible that all of human history is behind us, somewhere, in the dark? (All the people, in all of time, who danced in circles around ballrooms and in circles around bonfires, who fought wars with blunderbusses and baked blueberry crumb cakes, are gone, gone, gone-o? But only this paper-thin sliver of the present remains?) Time is a mystery as is, obviously, death.
I’ve been troubled by these thoughts my whole life; existentially challenged, deficient in trust that it all makes sense or is as it should be. I’ve mentioned before in this column how I was highly bothered as a small child by how yellow the pages of a newspaper become with the passing of only a few weeks. And why is yellow the color of passing time? It disturbed me greatly when I was 6 that the sand on the side of Cranberry Hole Road had a yellow tinge that matched the yellow of the aging pages of my copy of “Charlotte’s Web.” At 12, I was rent with existential despair that the month of September, when it rolled around inevitably again, inevitably brought a shift in the wind direction — northerly chill — and a yellowing and reddening of the leaves of the maples and oaks. Goldenrods and 1970s “harvest gold” seemed to me to be the color of irreconcilable existential questioning.
We’re swimming in time so we don’t always see the mystery.
What is time?
No, what is it?
Aging is not just wear and tear. All things, sentient and not sentient, have a life cycle. We all contain something ticking that strikes a certain number and starts breaking down. I demand to know what this is all about. I’d like to speak to the Manager.
My pretentious existential crisis, this week, was brought about by the demise of my dishwasher. We had a 16th-birthday breakfast for Teddy, home from boarding school for fall break, before his sister hopped the L.I.R.R. to return to college from her own fall break, and after frittata and avocado toast, the dishwasher, a G.E. from P.C. Richard and Son, bid us adieu. It made humming and chugging noises during the usual hour of its washing cycle, but the dishes, pans, and cutlery were still dirty when I opened the door to put them away. Oh, la.
The clothes dryer broke a few months ago, too, and now will only function for 40-minute intervals, which isn’t enough time to dry even a tea towel, because it’s one of these star-rated eco-things that dries the clothes by motion, or friction, something, rather than by heat. People complain that household appliances don’t last as they used to in the good old days and are designed to break down at the five-year mark, and people are correct: Both of these stupid appliances gave up the ghost in year five.
At least we know why appliances break down after a set number of years: because their manufacturers make them so.
But why do we? Creation has internal timekeeping mechanisms, on the cellular level, and I don’t think science has provided any proper explanation. Is it just that all things must die in order to provide, well, mulch for new things?
As if we needed reminding, the buildings around us are a lively reminder of time passing, cruel time. The shingles gather lichen and bittersweet vine claims the roof of a potting shed.
I often think that the Star office building is a giant timekeeping device. The way the dust accrues on filing cabinet tops as the wall clock in the front office tick-ticks and a stranger outside the window carries on an animated (silent) cellphone conversation with large gestures in the garden of Clinton Academy next door. The weekly rhythmic rituals of a weekly newspaper keep the beat of time, like a hand patting along to “The Maple Leaf Rag” on the lid of a piano. It is in the aggregation of accumulated work that we understand our life is passing. (If we’re lucky, I guess.) I am on column 350 this week. How about that?
I read a news article this week — okay, I scanned a news article this week — that reported on some study that had shown that the later in life a woman has children, the longer she lives. If you have kids after 33, your chances of living into your 90s increase; have one after 40, and you may more likely live past 95. As far as I could tell, the science was good news for women who had babies by natural birth, not through adoption, so I’m not sure what it might mean for me. I was tardy indeed in having my own kids. They were adopted, but in my opinion, they are in fact keeping me younger than I might be otherwise. I mean, they do turn my hair gray with their shenanigans (don’t play chicken on the railroad tracks, Teddy!), but through children I get to linger a bit longer in the vicinity of youth. Watching them play sports, running after them, visiting boutiques where they try on tiny minidresses, keeping up on the lingo, dancing in the kitchen at their command, awake at 3 a.m. because the boys have just come rambling into the house after a homecoming kegger.
We go down to the lakeside and watch a son sail in a racing dinghy. At least we are in the sunshine.