A lovely thing happened to me this week. I was talking to someone whose husband is undergoing chemotherapy, and I told her I'd done the same, for breast cancer, five years ago. I don't tend to talk about it very much, but I sometimes throw my hat into the ring (do you remember those great caps I used to wear when I had no hair?)
After the conversation, when we'd gone our separate ways, I stopped and thought. Hang on. We're May 2015. My cancer diagnosis was May 2009. That's SIX years ago. I said five, but a year has sped by, and now it's six. And how very wonderful, that I'm no longer specifically aware of how many years it is, not without thinking about it.
Time can be an ally as well as an enemy, a restorer as well as a thief. We know Father Time, the slow steady figure who regulates our lives with his measured rhythm. What about Mother Time? She who strives with her whole being to hold on to choice moments as they slide from under her feet, and who drags her heavy heels when the treadmill of life is weary?
Speaking of mothers, I was talking to one the other day, as she held her baby. I asked how old the baby was.
"Seven months on Tuesday week", came the reply.
I smiled. "Six months" would have served the purpose. "Six months" or "seven months". What difference? Either would have told me what I needed to know. But to that mother, every week, every day, perhaps every hour, the baby changes, grows, tries and accomplishes new things. Seven months old, not this Tuesday coming, but the one after. Each day between now and then a precious compendium of the familiar and the amazingly new.
Passports. They're another marker of the perplexity of time. I had to photocopy 14-yo's today, for the purposes of opening a bank account. It was issued in May 2011, and there is his 10 year old face staring out. When you receive your new passport, the date of expiry makes you stop. May 2016! Five years away! It seems hard to comprehend that a document can project so far into life. I probably said at the time
"Goodness! When we next have to renew your passport, you'll be 15! Difficult to imagine! I wonder what we'll be doing then."
And here I am, wondering a little what we were doing back then.
It was 14-yo who, when a small boy, told me that it was unfair being a child, because when you're having fun, time goes very fast, and then when you're bored, it goes slowly. Regretting the demolishing of a piece of innocence, but knowing that Honesty required the deed, I told him that actually, it's the same for grown-ups.
Perhaps instead of characterising Time as Father or Mother, it's best to think of it as Friend. I like the idea of Friend Time, close by our side as we potter along, always there, a shadowy companion who disappears if we turn to look at him (or is it her?), but who we glimpse continually out of the corner of our eye, though it's more an awareness than a proper sighting. Friend Time. Do you like that idea?
'
