The Passage of Time

At this time I would like to state my formal objection to the passing of time. Yes, it’s really starting to bother me, the gradual changes that comes with time‘s ceaseless march. The main thing that aggravates me is that I seem to be constantly getting older. I’ve tried to come up with an answer, but as of yet I’ve been stymied. When I was sixteen I wished time would pass more quickly. I actually wanted to get older. Now that I'm almost sixty I'd like to have time stop altogether.

These days I’m constantly noticing unwanted sign posts that signify that, much to my chagrin, time is not standing still. Yesterday was particularly painful. I saw four separate indications that time is passing by. The first signpost appeared in the morning. I was filling my car with gas when the teenage kid using an adjacent pump asked me if I knew why the filling station referred to regular gas as “unleaded”. For just an instant I wondered if he were pulling my leg. Well of course he was asking sincerely. A few seconds of math and I calculated that the kid was at least ten years short of birth when lead was removed from gasoline.

The second signpost came about fifteen minutes later. I was awaiting my breakfast in a restaurant, sitting on a stool at the lunch counter. I overheard an older gentleman request that his son take a lot of pictures on the son’s vacation. “I’ll want to see some slides of my grandchildren,” the elder man pronounced. Slides? I’d forgotten all about slides and slideshows. In fact, I had to do some research to find out if slides were even used anymore. Not surprising, they have been made obsolete by the Digital Age. You won’t find many 8mm home movies either.

The next time-passing signpost came in mid afternoon. It was a gentleman smoking one of those heavy, wooden pipes. Yeah, he was sitting in an old car, waiting at a red light, the smoke puffing out of the top of his pipe like steam from a percolating coffee pot. He looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. I can’t honestly say when it was that I last saw someone smoking a heavy-duty hardwood pipe. Cigars and cigarettes are still around, especially cigarettes. And I’ve watched the TV show Cops where they’ve arrested someone with a homemade crack pipe. But it’s been years since I’ve seen a guy smoking an old-fashion tobacco pipe. But there he was, the interior of his ’91 Olds growing increasingly hazy with pipe smoke.

The final telltale sign of time passing came almost immediately thereafter. The pipe smoking man was thin, 40ish, dark-haired and bespectacled. He was a dead-ringer for the fictitious Henry Mitchell, the pipe-smoking father of comic strip legend Dennis the Menace. And there it was, the recollection of a bygone comic strip, and a character therein. Yeah, when it comes to the passage of time, even the funny pages can be merciless.