A Meditation on the Passage of Time; Or, Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May
IT WAS October, 1978, and Halloween was coming. The girls and I spent a lovely warm afternoon at the picnic table in the back yard turning three of four pumpkins into Jack O'Lanterns, as you see on the right.
Sadly, in our household, Halloween fell by the wayside that year, when Mom had a meltdown and fetched up in the hospital thanks to an unspeakably ugly episode with some members of her family a week or so earlier. The girls had their Halloween with my parents in the Philadelphia area while I minded the homestead on my own.
I didn't revisit the Jack O'Lanterns until just before Thanksgiving that year. The only pumpkin not showing the ravages of decay and the passage of time was the one which had escaped the knife that lovely October afternoon.
Funny thing, the passage of time. Sometimes we don't notice it until too late. In this case, life went on, and here I sit looking back at some pictures of a long-gone autumn, wistfully realizing I'll never get those moments back, except in the form of a pair of images formed as part of an interaction between light and a chemical process.
IT WAS October, 1978, and Halloween was coming. The girls and I spent a lovely warm afternoon at the picnic table in the back yard turning three of four pumpkins into Jack O'Lanterns, as you see on the right.
Sadly, in our household, Halloween fell by the wayside that year, when Mom had a meltdown and fetched up in the hospital thanks to an unspeakably ugly episode with some members of her family a week or so earlier. The girls had their Halloween with my parents in the Philadelphia area while I minded the homestead on my own.
I didn't revisit the Jack O'Lanterns until just before Thanksgiving that year. The only pumpkin not showing the ravages of decay and the passage of time was the one which had escaped the knife that lovely October afternoon.
Funny thing, the passage of time. Sometimes we don't notice it until too late. In this case, life went on, and here I sit looking back at some pictures of a long-gone autumn, wistfully realizing I'll never get those moments back, except in the form of a pair of images formed as part of an interaction between light and a chemical process.
2 comments:
True. We contemplate the past, dream of the future, and take the present for granted. We still never realize that we are in Paradise until after we have been thrown out!
AMEN.
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