Our parents: Were they ever that young? Here they are deceased 20 years ago smiling at their baby grandchildren. Our children — now grandparents themselves — are in diapers playing on sliding boards and swings tumbling in the grass laughing so infectiously that I can almost hear them now 50 years later.
Old photo albums bring back memories of course and although they rekindle the joy of happy moments they are a stark reminder that life rolls by k’heref ayin like the blink of an eye a reminder to make our days count. Those thousands of days and nights those years and decades — into which black hole did they disappear as if they never existed?
(The mind wanders: Does Time that indefinable abstraction “exist” per se? If so how do we sense it? We can touch a chair see a color hear a voice. None of our senses tell us of the presence of Time. Time is a convenient construct enabling us to force this amalgam of past present and future into some manageable form. Who knows? Perhaps Time does not move at all but stands perfectly still while we move through it and pause briefly at certain scheduled stops? But we must leave these musings for another — shall I say? — “time.”)
Time is the world’s strictest taskmaster overseeing the graying of the hair the wrinkling of the skin the bending of the back the aching of the limbs — all the accoutrements that subtly remind us to book safe passage from This World into the Next. And of course there is a Next one otherwise the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to would render meaningless the few years of life on this Earth years which King David describes as mostly amal va’aven “toil and pain ” even if those years should total 80 or more (Tehillim 90:10).
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