I’ve been thinking about the strange behavior of time.
I am told it moves along in a linear fashion, at least in every location I can reasonably expect to find myself in throughout my life, but this description doesn’t match my experience. Time expands and contracts in bizarre ways. While the phenomenon seems to be a universal human experience, having small children does provide this external representation of the odd passage of time. For example, approximately one nanosecond after I have a child, the same child is gently patting my abdomen and asserting in a complete sentence, “I ‘member when I lived in there, Mama.” But somewhere in the nanosecond between his or her birth and the emergence of intelligent speech, I spent several years awake at nighttime with each child while he or she cried at me. Time has this non-linear quality. We all have examples of this, even without a rocket capable of near lightspeed travel.1
Time is also subject to strange constraints on the short term. We have five children, under eight years old,2 and in any given 24-hour day, there is not a “great time” for us to go to Scheels.
(To anyone who is asking, “What is ‘Scheels’?”—just imagine a carnival wedged inside of a sporting goods store that also happens to be a mall, and you’re most of the way there.)
Invariably, that kind of errand will mess with someone’s eating or sleeping or plain need for a moment alone, no matter when we choose to go. Of course, we could do something sensible, like dividing and conquering, but what if we have somewhere we need to go right afterward? And really, if we’re in a phase in which there is no such thing as “great timing,” is there such a thing as “bad timing”?3
This is how all seven of us ended up in Scheels at 2:18 p.m. with no snacks and no intention of riding the Ferris Wheel.
The baby was asleep in his carseat in the basket of our shopping cart, because God is merciful, but everyone else got the full experience of being lost among the hundreds of thousands of items and being told “No, we’re not going to buy that.” We were looking for inflatable stand-up paddleboards.4 But after one lap of the main level of the store, we realized that the thing we really needed to find was the elevator. All told, this took us about 30 minutes (yes, of course we asked someone, yes, it still took that long).
Four members of the party were sent up the stairs on a scouting mission to see if the desired objects were, in fact, there. They were. So we all boarded the elevator and pressed the proper buttons, then lumbered across the second level of Scheels. Seven of us: one sleeping baby in a carseat in the shopping cart basket, four other children of various sizes dangling their limbs off the sides of the same vehicle, one parent pushing the cart, the other following closely behind.
And then, as we rounded the corner of a mountain of hundreds of taxidermized animals, I saw it, stretching away towards the rafters: an enormous paddleboard on display, towering over the other inventory, almost twice as tall and twice as wide.
According to the sticker, the paddleboard (a Retrospec “Weekender—Crew”) is almost 16 feet long (the average paddleboard is about 10 feet) and can hold up to 1050 lbs.5 In other words, you can take everybody. And you can have a good time. But you’re not going to go very fast.
And if that’s not a metaphor for my life, then I’m not sure what is.
I have been trying, of late, to be more relaxed about timing. To be less concerned about how long it takes us to do anything—to put on socks, to sit down for dinner, to buckle the car seat straps (“I do it MYSELF!”). To understand that someone—no telling who, often me—is just going to have a hard time getting out of the door.
Because maybe the reason we can’t go any faster is that we’re on a giant paddleboard, and that’s not what those are for, anyway. Might as well try to accept the slow pace—enjoy it, even.
Because I’ll blink and it’ll be over.
At least, that’s what they tell me. I’ve tried it though, and time doesn’t seem to work that way.
Thank you to anyone and everyone who has ordered a copy of Eucharistic Saints or told someone about the book! I truly believe that word of mouth is the way that books find the people who need them. My friend Rachel won the Easter Giveaway, so I’m delighted to be dropping off a bundle of wonderful books at her house. It seems fitting, since she introduced me to an incredible book, Searching for and Maintaining Peace by Fr. Jacques Phillipe, during Lent.
Exhibit A, what happens when you let your household physicist edit your blog.
A highlight of this week was reconnecting with a friend I haven’t talked to in a decade—her response, after I texted her a picture of our Christmas card: “FIVE children? Did you adopt? Or did all of them come out of you??”
Yes. But also no. You feel me?
The aforementioned physicist’s desired birthday present.
We didn’t end up buying this monstrosity, but it is on the “Man, wouldn’t that be cool someday?” list.
Meredith, I think your substack is one of the few that gets a real chuckle out of me. Please continue.
My children’s primary goal in life is to go to Scheels. There’s one that’s about 10 min from church and it is an occasion of great joy. I say that it’s like the zoo, but dead.