Decades

Re-read The Gunslinger over the past couple of weeks.  Realized that I was 16 when I read it last time.  I will turn 33 tomorrow.  It’s been 17 years since I’ve read The Gunslinger.  17 years.  When experiences you consider close start taking on multiple decades you know you’ve gotten old.  17 years.  Has it been that long?  I know it has, but dang I don’t feel it.  Yesterday I was a teenager, today I’m a man of 33.  It gives a phantom perspective, a kind of strange feeling that time is so absolute in its ephemerality.  There is no moment of time in life that is not fleeting.  Yesterday my parents were young, they were young and having their own children, my sister and I.  Yesterday I was a kid running barefoot through hard clay, picking careful footfalls to avoid the sweetgums that towered over our backyard.  Today I am a husband and father, tomorrow I will be a grandfather. 

When history is studied its done event by event.  You take the spikes on the graph, the wars, the coups, the depressions.  Much of history is lost to boredom.  When momentous events occur people feel the need to commemorate.  The everyday is lost.  What you get is a kind of compression.  We look at events that seem very close together, they feel like relatives, even though they are separated by years, decades.  How often when you hear the history of the 20th century is World War I and World War II talked about within the space of a couple of breathes?  The span of half a century is easily a couple of weeks of a history class.  The decade we call the “roaring 20’s” gets maybe a couple of paragraphs.  A whole decade, a couple of paragraphs.  We don’t know what we’re living through right now, only our grandchildren will know.  They will ask us, “what was it like to live through the 90’s” and the confused expression we saw on our grandparents faces will be our own.  “It was like living through any other time, it was just living...”  

I guess what I’m getting at is I wonder where the spikes are on my graph?  To be honest I feel they have all occurred within the past five years.  I got married, had a son, graduated college.  That leaves 2 decades of what?  Maybe my spikes on the graph are coming later in life.  Maybe the next decades will be where a history of my life would focus, and my 20’s will be marked only like the roaring 20’s in a history book, short paragraph, they happened, and then they were gone.