Letters to Jack #2. On keeping time and losing time.
By: S.A. King
Tags: Parenting, Family, Relationships, Time, Stories

Black hole photo courtesy of NASA. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7372

My Dearest Jack,

I have been pondering the concept of time recently. It’s a subject that I know you are keen to understand. Tracking time. Keeping time. Being on time. Losing time. I’ve seen how you fret over being late. I’m fairly certain you picked up that concern from your mother. She grew up with family members who struggled to arrive places on time and I think it created an always present anxiety in her that she has, perhaps unfortunately, passed on to you.

I’m impressed with how you keep track of time, dutifully setting alarms for yourself in the morning to catch the bus. I laugh at your preciseness about knowing what time it is. 3:47 is NOT 3:45, nor is it 3:50, it is precisely 3:47. This is a trait you’ve most certainly inherited from your Father’s family. We are notorious for our focus on exactness, and obnoxiously correcting those who are not precise enough.

I’m puzzled by your compulsion to repeatedly check the time bar on YouTube videos you are watching. I wonder, are you checking because you are worried you don’t have enough time to finish the video? Or are you just fascinated with the visual representation of passing time, the bar a horizontal thermometer, the mercury slowly filling as the video continues towards its undeniable end. Perhaps it’s the end that you fear and fascinate over? Do you hope that regularly checking the clock will somehow stretch time, delaying the end? And then I wonder what habits and ticks of mine are attempts to do the same…

My Son, we mark time in myriad ways. There are of course the standard means for tracking time. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, decades. These are useful and in many ways serve as the shared rhythm keepers for all of us. But I’m more interested in exploring the individualized ways we keep track of time.

I remember when I was your age, I marked time much the same way I’ve seen you do: holiday breaks from school. Starting in September, I would set my sights on the first day off from school, which was often Columbus Day in October. Halloween, although not a day off, was my next target. Thanksgiving, and then the Big One, Christmas. Post-Christmas was always tough. Sure, we had a few days off here and there, but it was always a painfully long stretch between New Years and Easter when finally, glorious relief, we would get another extended break from school. Once you get past Easter it is then, of course, a sprint to June and the pure joy that is a timeless Summer.

The long, unstructured, summer vacation days spent out in the hot Virginia sun were pure freedom. Unleashed from the dual masters of Clock and Calendar, my brothers and I reveled in days spent at the pool and playing baseball and building forts in the woods. Granted, all was not perfect in this timeless space. Without the structures of time, we often languished under a new master, perhaps more cruel than our school year masters: Boredom. Thankfully, we had a mother, your Mimi, who rarely lacked in imagination and creativity.

It is perhaps hard for you to imagine your Mimi, whom you have only ever known since after she lost a lot of her strength and energy, outside romping for hours with us kids. I wish you could have experienced it, though. She was unstoppable. When Boredom would whisper its toxic blend of lethargy and despair, Mom would always rescue us with some madcap scheme. Did you know she invented the greatest game known to humankind? It’s called Gypsy Moth Ball and it is an insane mashup of kickball, baseball, tag, and pure joy. There were paper crafts and board games on rainy days. There were all-family studies of foreign cultures and countries which, set in a pre-internet era, were both difficult and insanely satisfying. There was genuine joy when we could find any details about China or Italy or Ecuador at our local library.

But not only was she great at helping us pass the time with games and activities, she would also find the most clever way to win at her games. In a water balloon fight, she would be the one who went inside to the kitchen and drop water bombs out of the window on those of us cleverly hiding in the stairwell below. In spotlight tag, she would be the one who didn’t mind getting caught quickly because she would use that time to go prepare ice cream for us and the neighborhood kids, which of course is a victory for all involved. In chess, she was the one who, after I came home bragging about my prodigious skills, having played with the school’s chess team, challenged me to a game and promptly beat my pants off in a 4 move checkmate. In that moment she either looked at me with a straight stoic face for as long as she could before she flashed what she would colloquially refer to as a “shit eating grin”, a phrase that is insanely disgusting when given a thought, but which I hardly gave said thought to, because that was my Mom. In those days, she was undefeated.

There were other ways I marked time besides holidays. One way was by when we moved to a new town. Because your Papa is a United Methodist Pastor, we moved pretty frequently. As a result, I’ve learned to mark different seasons of my life by the town I lived. Lafayette, Edinburg, Covington, Shawsville, Purcellville. College in Salem, home to Waynesboro, out to Evanston, back to Madison, Fredericksburg, and Broadway. Even after leaving my parents’ home, I’ve never lived in one town for longer than 4 years and it’s created a consistent rhythm that is remarkably hard to break. Yet now I’m recognizing that your need for stability is forcing me to confront that rhythm. We’ve lived in our current town for 4 years and I’ve started to feel that rising anxiety, the desire to start looking for a new town, a new job, a new school, a new adventure. But the possibility of providing you a Home that has its anchor in geography as much as family relationship is enticing. Perhaps you don’t need to learn this 4 year rhythm of mine. Maybe you can grow deeper connections with people and places than I ever have. There is a tug-of-war in my spirit, son. Do I stay or do I go now? That question is no longer easy to answer.

In high school, I marked time by girlfriends. 5–6 months with April. 2 months with Jackie. 1 month with Amanda. Almost a year with Emily. Then came the era of Heather, an incredibly important relationship in my lifetime (perhaps 2nd only to your mother in terms of romantic relationships) that will inevitably show up in these stories from time to time. Regardless, it has been a theme in my life that romantic relationships have served as key time markers, especially in my adolescent and young adult life. Those markers served to carve up my life into smaller chunks as I went through a fair number of romantic relationships in a short number of years.

Meeting and marrying your mother has obviously changed that pattern as we are almost 13 years into our connection. Where once the changes in relationship-marked time were more frequent and dramatic, time has now started to stretch out. It’s hard to understand how this all works exactly, as some relationships have felt incredibly long, others fleetingly short, and others have distorted my experience of time entirely. It’s like the movie Interstellar, which I know has both fascinated you and caused you to shudder with dread. Do you remember in that movie when the main character, Cooper, travels down to Miller’s planet? It was the planet that was covered in water which swelled into rhythmic tides hundreds of feet high. When on that planet, which was deep within the black hole’s gravity well, Cooper and the others experienced time much more slowly. What felt like an hour for them equated to decades outside of the gravity well, which of course led to devastating results for Cooper and his family back on Earth. I wonder if that is similar to my experience of romantic relationships. Each of my relationships exerted some level of emotional and relational gravity on me, stretching and distorting my experience of time in a variety of ways. The stronger the gravity, the more extreme the emotional pull, the longer the experience has felt in relation to the objectively measured time.

I mentioned Heather earlier, and there is no denying that my relationship with her, while only lasting two years, had significant gravity. Looking back, it is clear that it stretched and distorted my experience of time in dramatic ways. The ripple from that relationship still effects me even years later, like some sort of romantic gravity wave. My relationship with your mother is not nearly as strong in terms of romantic gravity, which is a very good thing! For as you know well, the severe gravity of actual black holes is terrifyingly destructive. I suspect it is also the case for relational black holes. In cultivating my marriage to your mother, I have discovered that a person is often better off in relationships that create stable orbits, just enough gravity to hold one another together in a delicate dance through space and time, but not so much as to collapse in on itself.

However you decide to mark time, my son, it is my hope that you do not lose your joy in the pursuit of capturing time. Time is ethereal and elusive. Attempting to contain it will leave you feeing like you are grasping at wisps and ghosts. It will feel never ending and foolish. And yet, I know deep down you will not be able to resist the urge to contain it. It’s just who we are. And so I offer you this bit of wisdom. Seek a balance, find that delicate bit of gravity that allows you to dance. Find that sweet spot in marking and keeping time. You can’t ignore time. Ignoring it entirely leads us to lose it and possibly lose our joy in the process. We need rhythm and rhyme. We need markers to help us make sense of our story. Without them, life can feel cloudy and undefined, like the feeling of disorientation one feels when taking strong pain medications or what I suspect floating through space untethered would feel like.

But also try to avoid developing a rigid obsession with marking and keeping time. That can destroy our joy as well. There are moments when we must learn to let go of our boundaries and encounter the vastness of time and space without a tether. These moments are what are called mystical experiences and when we encounter and embrace them, I believe they can reveal depths of reality that we cannot know otherwise. Allow yourself to become lost in a great story where time and space disappear and you are transported to another place, another time. Embrace your loved ones and notice how hours pass in a blink. Learn to regularly take a deep breath and close your eyes and give yourself just a moment to remember that our time, no matter how we measure and mark it, is perhaps our most precious and delicate gift. And we must hold it like all precious and delicate things, with a steady and open hand.

- Your loving father