Your Humble Blogger has been thinking about the passage of time.
Time passes. Listen! Time passes.
This Tohu Bohu is more or less nine years old; the best anniversary for the blog is probably February 24. Nine years is quite a while for a blog, I’m told, although of course I have been reading blogs that have been going on for longer than that. I’m still not sure what purpose it all serves, but it has gone on for nine years; I have been blogging for long enough to have written out my ambivalence over the then-upcoming invasion of Iraq.
Earlier in the week The Youngest Member marked his fifth birthday. It seems like a bigger deal than the fourth or sixth, but developmentally, it isn’t. Developmentally, this is the first birthday on which he remembers a previous birthday, but that’s about it. We still can’t leave him home alone.
On Wednesday, I figured out that the sweater I was wearing had been made twenty-five years previously, give or take a few weeks. It’s a mother-knitted sweater (the best kind), one of only two remaining in my active wardrobe. Well, three, but that’s counting one that was knitted for an elder brother. My two sweaters were ones I mostly designed (the grey one with the dark blue honeycomb pattern, and the garnet one with the white diamonds), and they are just about my favoritest garments ever. They have held up to twenty-five years of wear, more or less weekly wear during the appropriate months; the hand-me-down has been in the rotation for at least ten (tho’ I think it was not often worn before that). Our mother stopped knitting for our generation altogether when her first grandchild was born, eighteen years and thirteen days ago. That grandchild is waiting to hear from the colleges she has applied to.
Time passes. Listen! Time passes.
Jamie Moyer is in spring training camp; was pitching in the big leagues before this sweater was knitted. I could, I suppose, mark out the milestones of my adult life by the arc of his career. He was with the Cubs when I met my Best Reader; he was with the Cardinals when I graduated college; I think I saw him pitch for the Red Sox during our sojourn there; he was with Seattle when I got married; he moved to Philadelphia around when I moved to Connecticut. Pitchers and catchers—including Jamie Moyer—reported last week to Spring Training.
A couple of weeks ago, the State of Arizona celebrated its centennial. On February 14 of 1912, the Union admitted the last real state. I wrote something about it for the 75th anniversary, for my high school paper. A month before, I had attended a march to support a state holiday celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr.; I may have been wearing that grey honeycombed sweater. Time passes. Two months after Statehood in Arizona, the Titanic sinks, and Downton Abbey starts. A couple of years later, my grandfather’s family flees Jaslow, finding refuge in Prague. He would have been around eight, I suppose, at that time; his great-grandson, who was named after him, turned five this week. As I said.
Time passes!
The crocus blossom I saw yesterday, by the sheltered corner of the house, was buried overnight by the wet snow.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Yes. This.
🙂