Well, have you started filling up your January calendar yet? I’m getting reminders to sign up for getting tax forms, reminders of making sure my address changes all went through, after Christmas sales, emails that say, beginning in January. . . , and a reminder to pick up the January book for Book Club. Then I think, do I bother to make New Year’s Resolutions that I’ll typricalkly break within the first two months of the new year? I was saying to someone yesterday, “can you believe a quarter of the century is ending–remember the 2000 scare about computers not being able to update?”
It’s true. . . time waits for no man. It is the existential fact, right? We have no control over the ravages of time. Yesterday my sister showed me a picture of an Easter service in our family church in 1952. The building is long gone. My sister and brother were sitting in the second pew. Our parents were in the choir, and my other sister and I were in a procession down the center aisle, holding daffodils, approaching a cross with chickenwire on it. The children processed while the choir sang “Christ the Lord is Risen Today. When the cross was completed, an array of gold flowers revealed the bright cross among twenty or so Easter lilies. I can still smell the fragrance when I think about it. It was a time when Easter lilies did not have their scent removed. Do you remember that scent?
All the little girls and women wore hats. The choir had robes. There was no room for guitars, drum sets, microphones, or monitors.
Our worship has changed, our traditions have changed, and sadly, church traditions seem to fade with each passing year, don’t they? Remember the Saturday night routine–bath, setting hair, putting out church clothes (saved only for Sundays and special occasions), and Sunday morning breakfast? Remember reading the Sunday newspapers and having family time in the afternoons, or visiting Grandma miles away? Remember spontaneously inviting new friends home for Sunday dinner, and FHB (family hold back) so there would be enough food to entertain others?
Times indeed have changed, and who can predict what’s to come?
Yes, I’m reminiscing. I used to think 2024 was a long time in the future. Goodness. I’ve been retired as long as I spent in school, including college. Where, indeed does time go?
The answer is, look at the blank pages of the 2025 calendar and see if it fills up as quickly as it used to. When all it contains are doctor visits’ dates, it speaks of the fact that octogenarians have more empty spaces than full ones, and it takes more effort to attend to each one. I’m of the opinion that those days will be filled with reaching out to others whose days are even less fulfilling than mine, and I’ll seek to make a difference to those who simple “pass the time” waiting for the next meal.
Let’s agree to fill the days of our lives with meaning and purpose, and the time, literally, will fly by, day by day and year by year.
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