Life is like toilet paper; faster at end
I’m writing from my 36th year. It’s snowing.
Mom claims the winter of ’88 was the worst one ever. I can’t remember. I can barely recall 10 years back when I’d just been hired as the head football coach of the Clarksville Panthers.
I was 26 and thought I knew everything.
Ten years before that — the same distance between the author version of Eli and the coach version — I was a sophomore quarterback for the Russellville Cyclones, and yes, I still thought I knew everything.
Time is strange.
The older you get, the more it shrinks. Literally. I’m talking fractions here. One year to a 2-yearold is half of his entire existence. One year to a 36-year-old is only one 36th of his life.
Or, as Coach Williams once put it: “Life is like a roll of toilet paper; the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.”
Amen, Captain. Amen.
It’s been a slow, cold day at the lake. The kids are out of school, stomping around above my office, waiting until I’m done “working” so we can go outside and play.
Last year, my son’s sled hit a tree. He was OK but it scared him. He keeps saying he’s not going to sled. My wife, a master subject-changer, asks both kids: “How old is Daddy today?”
One says 49. The other 80-something. I’d take 80-something. Johnny Wink’s 80-something. In 10 more years, my dad will be 80-something, too.
When we go out to my parents’ house, Dad gets “air” on the blue sled. He also veers off into the woods and almost takes out both kids. After witnessing Dad’s daredevil moves, my son decides he’ll give the blue sled a try, too.
Little man starts at the bottom of the hill and slides down. After such a slow ride, he moves up a little. Then a little more, and more. Until, finally, my son is at the top of the hill with the rest of us, as high as we can go.
Back at home, the kids are exhausted.
My wife and I get them to bed early, a little before 8, then sit down cross-legged on the living room floor. The lake is calm through the nearby picture window, a pane of black glass against the snow-lined shore. My wife sets a timer for three minutes. We press our backs together. We close our eyes. We breathe.
Of all the 1,440 minutes that compose today, these three are my favorite, shorter — relatively, fractionally — than the three that came before it, but deeper, somehow, too. The timer goes off.
I open my eyes and feel my wife’s back moving, her vocal cords rattling air that tickles my eardrums, forming words I’ve heard but never quite felt like this before:
“Happy birthday.”