"I suppose it's like the ticking crocodile, isn't it?"

“I suppose it's like the ticking crocodile, isn't it? Time is chasing after all of us.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan





Last week I was at my parent's house. No one else was home at the time, and I, in my musings, found an old box of photographs in our office/workout room/blue room (My parent's let me pick the color. It doesn't match anything in our house and sticks out like a sore thumb. But I love color). I pulled the box from the book shelf and pulled out a stack of photogrpahs and turned them over one at at time. Memories I'd forgotten I had. Summers at the beach. Dance recitals. My Father's 50th birthday.

As children we think about growing up. What we're going to be, or who we'll marry, where we'll live. Our time is marked by grade levels, sporting practices. Prom. Graduation. Baby teeth to braces. Puberty. First kisses. Hair Cuts. So much spinning and changing around us. Drivers licences at 16. Legal at 18. Drunk and not hiding it at 21. I've always been aware of my own time. I've been labling, counting it down, marking it, waiting with it, and spending it at my own leisure, my whole life.

While flipping through these photos I realized something. It struck me all of a sudden and took over every other emotion I'd been feeling, replacing them with gut wrenching saddness and anxiety. All this time I'd spent grwoing up and getting older I'd failed to realize that so had my parents.

My hands were trembling as they held a picture from Dad's 50th. It was him and Mom, dancing. My mom was smiling, my dad, very obviously counting steps in his head
1,2...3,4 1,2...3,4

He's a terrible dancer, my father. and he's very graciously passed his lack of rhythm onto all of his children, myself included. My mother on the other hand, she lights up when she dances. She can be silly and sexy and entirely free when she dances. She's infectious on the dance floor, everyone watching has a better time when she dances. They catch her bliss. Her liveliness. She's really quite pretty when she dances.

My Dad has never cared for dancing but he took lessons and learned as best he could anyways. Not for my mother who never lacks a willing dance partner, but for himself. He couldn't bare the jealously he felt when he watched Mom dance with anyone else. Adorable, I think.
I remember every Sunday morning Bob and Elsie the dance instructors coming to our house to teach him. I'd wake up to the sounds of Samba, Foxtrot, West Coast and East Coast Swing, Salsa, Two Step...
They danced the whole lot of them.

Which my parents were dancing in the photo, I'm not sure. It didn't matter to me at that moment. What mattered to me was that my dad still had hair on his head in the picture.

Funny, I thought he'd been completely bald for as long as I could remember. I forgot, his hair was brown, same as mine. And his skin, it was so smooth. When had the tired lines I've grown so accustomed to first ripple across his face? Hadn't they always been there? And my mom. She was so skinny. I'd never noticed that she'd...
Well, I'd never noticed any of it.
All this time I'd been so preoccupied with what I thought was MY time, I failed to see that it wasn't just me but ALL of us that were subject to it. My sisters. Our family dog, Shelby, she can't get up and down the stairs or jump up on the couch anymore. We used to run around the block together.


All these years, it all went unnoticed, and then with one photograph it came crashing down all around me. It was so obvious. How did I not see it? I held the evidence of it in my shaking hands. Frozen in time, a couple that looked like my parents but weren't. Not really. My parents didn't dance together anymore. I didn't wake up to music on Sunday mornings anymore.

I was a 20 year old girl, or maybe, woman? young lady? No longer child but some strange child/adult hybrid. And my parents
they were,
Old?

This realization unsettled me to my core. Time, once an unseen, and unobtrusive fact of the matter, a freckle you've always known you had but hardly remembered you had, was suddenly in actuality a looming specter, a ticking bomb, and exposed artery that could burst if you made a sudden movement, sneezed, laughed...

I wanted to cry and I wanted my father to hold me. I wanted to be 5 years old, getting picked up from kindergarten in our beat up van. I wanted to drive past the Jr. High and look to see if I could see my big sisters running the track. I wanted my mom to make dinner again. I wanted to roller blade to my grandma's house, being pulled by Shelby on her leash.

I felt as though I'd been sleeping all this time, and woke up to a strange world where nobody skipped anymore, and didn't have time to watch Boy Meets World in the mornings before school, and everyone thought about money, and boxes were for packing your toys away in to put up in the rafters, instead of playing make-believe inside of. A world where your Dad goes to bed at 9:00 because he's tired. And where your mom doesn't have time to dance anymore because she's too tired. Because I woke up and was older. And they were older. And I was sitting there, hands trembling, trying to think of just when it was that this all happened.

And then I took a deep breath. Looked at the culprit that brought this terror to my attention, and ran my thumb across my father's face. I surprised myself by laughing. I laughed because despite it all, and despite the years, on the occasion that my parent's do find the time to dance together, my dad still needs to keep count in his head.

This comforted me in some strange way. I smiled at them, my parents, and put the picture back in its box. I put the box back on its shelf. And I went to find which of her three napping spots Shelby happened to be occupying.

It's silly to worry about time. It's certainly a poor way of spending it. I've decided to be aware of it though. Use it more wisely, more gratefully. Tell Mom that she's pretty. And tell Dad I love him more. I've decided to make time for skipping on occasion, because who says I'm too old to? Its quicker than walking, and I challenge anyone to skip without smiling. You can't. I'm going to make time to laugh more. Because one day, like my parents, my face will wrinkle and when I catch my own reflection, or stumble across an old photograph, I want to be reminded that what caused those lines, etched so deeply in my face, was not the passing of time, but was a life happily lived.