Of Time, Courtship and the Rat Race

Maybe she actually had spinach between her teeth when she smiled; maybe my memory is just having a little fun at her expense. Frankly, I don’t remember. It was 36 years ago, give or take a month or two. Thirty-six years ago in Princeton, New Jersey, where we fetched up one evening after a random drive in the country. I’d been out late the night before, a novice newspaper reporter covering a warehouse fire somewhere on the north central Philadelphia waterfront -- around Front and Spring Garden Streets, as I recall. The following day I was going to State College to report on the student situation at the convergence of Earth Day 1970, the Cambodian incursion and the Kent State shootings. In the midst of all that scurrying about, while we dined at the Nassau Inn in Princeton, I asked a girl to marry me; she smiled and said yes. But I can’t remember whether or not she really had spinach between her teeth. I wouldn’t testify to it in a courtroom. Today, that string has long since played itself out. The girl who may or may not have had spinach between her teeth and I are divorced and in some ways I feel as if we were never married. In other ways we remain firmly bonded -- by the fat alimony checks I was sending her every month until just recently, for one thing. Parts of our marriage live on, too, in our children, no longer children but young women in their early thirties starting to travel their own paths through the world. I seldom see them these days. When I do, I notice resemblances and changes which seem to have appeared out of the ether, flitting ghosts haunting their earthly houses before the earth has settled around their bones. Taking the time to watch over my daughters as they grew to maturity has been the supreme joy of my life -- purchased at a definite price. In our line of work, it seems, time is money and money is the measure of your worth. Time spent with children doesn’t generate money. Then again, I don’t believe those who try to dictate policy in our line of work have the last word on the measure of anyone’s worth. The passage of time is a slippery thing, all right. It happens whether we pay attention to it or not. Sometimes, in our inattentiveness, we wonder where it went. Sometimes we pay so much attention we become obsessive about it, and I think that gets us -- me, anyway -- into a bit of trouble. According to the watch that shackles my left wrist, I’ve now used up half this morning’s allotment of personal writing time. Waiting in my briefcase is the appointment book which will rule the remainder of my day. On my desk at the office is the time sheet on which I will try to capture and hold as much as I can of today in six-minute billable bits. Some clever fellow in the Israeli Army is credited with the observation that we finally reach an equilibrium of sorts when we spend all of our time documenting the things we don’t have time to do because we’re so busy documenting them. When I ponder that observation, I wonder whether I could survive off this treadmill, out of this rat race -- and learn once again to measure time by the turn of the seasons, the phases of the moon, the sea tides; the subtle, hardly noticed changes in children as they grow; the receding memory of a courtship in which the girl may or may not have had spinach between her teeth when she smiled and accepted the boy.