In the fall of 1971, which was a million years ago for those of you younger than 45 or so, I was just starting a job as a new teacher. Marlan Davis, my department chairman, opened his greeting to the English department by stating, “As we sit here in 1971, we are closer to the start of the 21st Century than we are to the start of World War II.”
The older teachers gasped and shook their heads with a stunned smile of amazement.
Mike, Bill, and I, who had all been born sometime after The War To End All Wars (Again), looked at each other and shrugged. After all, that War was a million years ago, mucking around somewhere in the dim distant past along with Shakespeare and the dinosaurs. The 21st Century was science fiction, farther away from us than our lives had been long, which meant that it would take forever to get there.
Mike, Bill, and I felt disconnected from the rest of the elder staff, unable to share in the wonder of their memories. But somehow we young teachers would have to find a way to collaborate with our dinosaur colleagues as we strode into the unimaginable future.
A lot of time has passed since 1971, including the start of the 21st Century (which, for those of you younger than 15 or so, was a million years ago).
Mike and Bill came to visit last week, spending four days or so with my wife and me at our home. As it turned out, we taught together for our entire careers. They have been retired from teaching, as I have, for about a decade, though Mike and Bill have continued coaching or officiating sporting events at the school since retiring.
And each night of their visit, as we sat with a glass of good Irish whiskey in hand, we gasped and shook our heads with a stunned smile of amazement as we shared lies and tales of an ever-speeding lifetime as colleagues and friends.
“Good grief, how can your grandson Quentin possibly be a freshman in college already?”
“Did we really watch five department chairmen come and go?”
“That young teacher I mentored really became a principal, and is now nearing retirement himself?”
All of those older colleagues who sat at our first department meeting—every one of them—have gone to join Shakespeare and the other dinosaurs wherever they are mucking about these days, and Mike, Bill, and I raised a glass to the memory of many of them. We also raised a glass to many of our students, some of whom have gone on to great fame. We even raised a glass to the children of some of our students, whom we also taught before we retired.
We did a lot of glass-raising over those four days.
But with each hoist of the glass we were stunned at how quickly time had passed. And we were a bit awed by the thought of how quickly would pass whatever remaining time we had left to hoist a glass.
I read somewhere that we don’t perceive any block of time as a measurable, constant unit that remains the same throughout our lifetimes. Rather, we view any unit of time—an hour, a day, a year—as a percentage of all the time we can remember. The longer your memory, the smaller each unit of time will seem.
Go ahead, give it a try. Tell a two-year-old on Christmas morning that the holiday will come again in exactly one year, and he will moan, “Aw-w-w, but that’s forever.” And he will be right, because the entirety of his memory stretches back no more than a year or so. For him, one year has been forever. Waiting another year will mean having to wait another forever.
But tell that child’s grandfather that Christmas will come again in another year and he will say, “Well hell, it’ll be here before you know it. We may as well leave the decorations up.”
It was like that for me, Mike, and Bill as we mined our memories during those four days of their visit. Each of us had been contacted and interviewed by student reporters from the school newspaper, because between us we had witnessed almost everything that had ever happened at that school, which was only a few years old when we started teaching—but this year is celebrating its 50th anniversary.
We shook our heads. And raised a glass.
In anticipation of Mike and Bill’s visit to my wife and me last week, I had printed up a photo of the four of us, taken during their visit last year at the same time of year. I placed the photo in the guest bathroom so they could see it every day of their visit.
And this year, as we sat at lunch one day, Mike laughed as he looked around the table. “You know,” he said, “three of us are wearing the same shirt today that we wore in that photo from last year.”
We laughed, but none of us felt embarrassed. After all, we were all wearing shirts that—compared to the rest of our wardrobe—were virtually brand new, purchased since our retirement. Mine has hung in my closet for no more than five or six years.
A blink of the eye.
