It's about time

It’s all about time:  the passage of time, the lack of time, the rhythm and pace of time.

"There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do, once you find them ….” Jim Croce said that in a song once.

In my "free" time, I research my great-great grandfather, a tall, lanky fellow whom family lore claims was a Cherokee Indian, hiding his racial identity.  His story has gripped me for years.  A while back, I had plenty of time to devote to that project. At one point, I looked up from records and websites and worn photos, and realized 16 hours had dissolved away in the blink of an eye.

Then a couple of months ago, I celebrated my birthday, and wondered where five decades had gone: I looked up, and they, too, had dissolved away in the blink of an eye.

Time.

When I started the research project, I assumed too much time had passed since these people left the world to tell their stories. After all, we are kept alive by the memories of generations who follow us. They remember the sound of our voices, the food we liked, our quirks and eccentricities -- all those things that make us human -- what we were like when we walked the earth and loved and laughed and cried and failed.  But those generations, too, have faded, and with them, memories of far more than what’s written in census records and birth certificates. And after all this time, I wasn't sure who would really care.

But I was wrong.

A strange thing is happening. I’m finding distant cousins I didn’t know existed. I’m reconnecting with family I haven’t talked to in years. And I’m discovering that there are indeed people who remember….

… my mother, who is 85
… my uncle, who is 89
… their cousin, who is 87

… people whose memories are peppered with fragmented images and impressions of their great-grandparents and great aunts and uncles. We must draw these memories out, while there is still time.

I didn't expect this project to bring us all together. We’re talking on the phone more often. We’re connecting on Facebook. We’re sharing family photos. We’re shooting emails around.  We're laughing about what we do remember.  We’re thinking about how we are all connected, and how we wish we had asked more questions when we were young, when more of our people were here, before time escaped us.  We wish we could make our children as interested in this as we are; but someday they will be, in their own time, as ours begins to run out.

So many stories to be told.  But there is that paycheck to be earned, and lots of driving to do, and piles of time spent doing what we must do, not necessarily those things that make time fly.