Jumbo Shrimp
Gary Rogowski
When I was young and sat in my high school classroom, I noticed that Time had a particular and peculiar and precise quality. This understanding let me open one drearied eye and take a small notice of it. Time moved, I felt sadly, at the pace of a snail on sleep aids. Time sidled along like a fastidious fat guy trying to eat a cake while strolling but constantly stopping to check his lapels. Time felt like I did at the time, a teenager unable to get out of bed, mouth open, struggling awaken and move a toe. And for me at that young age, I felt that great sadness shared by every youth who languished in sorrow as Time plodded his weary way along. When was life going to start for me? I moaned.
I wanted Time to move fast, and I wanted this to occur every day. When I yearned with my whole being for the boring hour of [insert school subject, Latin for instance, Latin was over-the-top boring and it took years for each class to grind its way through its allotted period], when I pined for this hour of Latin with Fr. Mierzwinski or Biology with Fr. Durkin or god help me Religion class with Br. Donald to be over with in those slow hours, Time melted at a glacier pace. Time shifted through the morning and afternoon minutes like clouds changing shape on a sunny day, There see them? just outside my classroom window. Time moved like ketchup or worse catsup. Very, very slowly. Ketchup at least tries to catch up but catsup just stalls. Why couldn’t Time speed up? Else I might remain this young forever I feared. I had things to do. I wanted Time to be faster on its feet.
I would watch the second hand in Latin class hang on desperately to each tick in a minute in those days. Time felt as if it dressed itself in molasses, or was on its way to a meet “the other nice children” at a church square dance. Don’t make me go, or it tried to mimic the drastic pace of a cheese mold forming. A minute of Time seemed to drag its ponderous way through an hour of effort. The clock I think actually slowed down as the minute hand hit the six past the hour. There at the bottom of the dial it was so hard for Time to make it back up the hill to the twelve and so its trip back up took so much longer now because it was struggling uphill against all odds up a steep slope fighting clock gravity and Time probably had a stone in its shoe too or a blister which made it walk slower and Time was fighting age and infirmity and Time probably had bursitis too or maybe even neuritis or neuralgia, Get an Anacin, I wanted to yell at it so it would move along with some alacrity. But Time hurt and walked with a cane because that one leg of his pained him like a sonofagun just listen to him complain.
Never get old, Time yelled back at me over his shoulder as he limped slowly up the hill.
Time passed for me then in that school morning with the speed of paper yellowing on the window sill or heliotropic plants turning their leaves to the sun. Or perhaps Time unfurled at the even more desperate speed of evolution. Time passed slowly for me is what I am trying to say to you as I sat in my prison cell of a classroom where Time almost stood completely still in its tracks.
You understand my point. You have felt this. You just barely remember this but you have experienced Time in its slowness. Particularly for the young, Time moves but imperceptibly if at all for them.
But as I have grown older, I have learned that Time for some strange reason has increased his speed. Hey wasn’t high school great, I said to myself, it was only a few, wait, what? Five years ago right? I blink my eyes in disbelief to realize it was ten quick ones. I go to bed now and toss and turn and 7 hours is over in two winks. Didn’t my head just hit the pillow? Okay I’ll hit the snooze button and that interval is done in one more half blink. I have also discovered in my busy days filled with so many chores and deadlines and roadblocks that Time likes to trot by me like an energetic jogger with a big smile on his face. Hey, Time yells out to me as he runs by, you’re wrong about college, that was fifteen years ago. And once again I am struck by how Time has become more nimble, more quick. Time is no longer slow. He has hit the speed switch and skips over that candle stick like it was nothing. Time jets through the years and days and hours and minutes and seconds. A decade? Two decades? What’s that? The snap of Time’s fingers. An involuntary twitch of my neck bone is how fast Time now runs through a year. Time has really gotten itself into shape I gotta say. Great shape. Faster than ever. Time must be taking spin class or something.
There. See? Time twitched. Another year is almost up.
This speed affects everything in my life as well. For instance, I need to have a project completed by the end of day at my bench. Five pm is my deadline and one thing after another occurs that slows my progress while simultaneously speeding up the clock so that when I look up and I see that I have not completed the job, I am saddened. I am also struck by how quickly my afternoon slipped like sand through my outstretched hands. I tried to hold onto it but held only its grainy trail.
But now for some unknown reason in this era of Covid, Time has decided on a new tack. It has figured that it can take on two opposing aspects for me. I imagine Time as it twists its misshapen lips and grimaced visage smirking at me. These aspects of Time I used to be able to keep separate. Time used to be unbearably slow. Then Time sped up to become super fast. Now in the midst of Covid-19 it is both diabolically slow and ridiculously fast all at once. Let me explain.
Time can now move in this pandemic so slowly that the day feels like the rerun of a rerun of a rerun of a Bruce Willis movie I just saw yesterday. Bruce smirks. Bruce gets the crap beat out of him and thrown out of a car doing 45mph but two seconds later he bounces back off the pavement that he just hit and boffs the bad guys and saves the day. Hells bells some nights all I need to do is roll over in bed wrong to pull a muscle or wake up with hip pain. Not Bruce. He is impervious to pain. As am I when I watch this rerun movie, one I’ve seen 16 or 17 times. I feel nothing as I watch it again and again because I am bored and lifeless and I feel nothing. Only this movie is now my life and it’s the same again today as it was yesterday. Groundhog Day revisited or Number 9, Number 9, Number 9, repeated over and over again. Get it up again, amen. Happy idiot. Same as it ever was. Pick your lyric. I live it now in this repeat of day after day.
But at the same time for some reason in these slow days of sameness and repetition and anxiety, I feel like these Covid days also speed by very quickly too. So in some ways it’s like that old Woodrow Allen joke: The food at this restaurant is terrible and the portions are so small. Same thing: the days are always so very much the same and slow and boring and then they go by so fast in the blink of an eye. Remember 2020? What? I wake up this morning and I have to do another day all over again and the day drags on and then all of a sudden it’s over. Bang. Shut the door. Another one gone. What did I get done today? I think I pulled a muscle in my back.
Perhaps this is just me. Your life is probably filled with neighborhood block parties of appropriately distanced and masked families getting together weekly to recite poetry and fantasy football stats or fantasy football stats recited in iambic pentameter. Now that’s a block party. Wish I could be a part of your block party. Maybe you guys swap new song lyrics you came up with that afternoon or snappy guitar licks over grilled romaine and jumbo shrimp on the appropriately distanced barbeque. You swap these lyrics to one another in your neighborhood while mine is just the spot where somebody else got their catalytic converter swiped for the precious metals in it to send overseas to some mob.
So this is how Time feels for me now. Time has become an oxymoron. Time has become Jumbo Shrimp. For those of you who don’t know what an oxymoron is, an oxymoron is someone who can walk and talk and breath in the air who is a complete idiot.
That is the definition of me. I breathe still. I am taking in oxygen for some unknown reason and I am happy, don’t get me wrong, I am happy about the O2 part, but I am also a total dunce for expecting things to be different each day when we are surrounded by sameness, a government too stupid to get out of the way of its own stupidity, and a medical system seemingly unprepared to save us miraculously. Where is that god dang Bruce Willis when we need him? An oxymoron is a good, bad day. A long, short hour. A repeat of something I’ve never done before but that seems so familiar.
Time has become Slow and Fast and lost its rubber band ability that I used to hate/ admire so fervently in Time before. Whereas before it could stretch slooooow and then this turned to fast as I turned to clay at least it didn’t happen all at once. Now it’s both speeds together and it’s a little disconcerting to see that in a few weeks it will be December. I will pause to let that sink in. It will be December in a few weeks and we were just getting used to summer and its regularity and boring sameness. A little bit of fall nip to the air but December?
Yep, December right around the corner and you thought you had Time before the year’s end to make good on your New Year’s resolutions.
Keep your wrist watch wound. You get the idea. Keep an eye on the time.
So, as with all my sermons, as with all good preachers, you know we’re coming back to my message. The same message I preach every few weeks because you know that this is why you’re here, to get this message and if I could get an amen from you right now, that would warm my digital heartbeat because I know you know it’s why we are all here: it’s the moment for me to tell you to get to a bench and build something.
I admonish you to Get Thee to a Work Bench. Even if all you do is arrange your tools, it will be different from yesterday and the day before. Maybe it will be different only because the tools are different. No matter. Get to a bench and start a very small project. One of my students informed me that every week he tries to get one small job done. This gives him hope. This gives him strength. Complete one small job at the bench and put it on your shelf at home or in the kitchen or by your bench. Something that congratulates you each Time you look at it. It will also help you forget about the time you’ve wasted since high school.
If you conquer a small hill each week you will be able to say: Look: I made a model of a toothpick. Great. That’s an accomplishment. Enjoy that satisfaction for a moment. Conquer another mini-mountaintop tomorrow.
Gary Rogowski
Lyle, WA
503-449-0607