Life, years — ‘long time passing’

By the time you are reading this, our year 2020 will be mostly passed.

Many of us will remember it as a long, hard year, although of course the actual year doesn’t vary much as the Earth revolves around the sun, spinning, spinning to make the days. It has been a year to leave your head spinning, even as the Earth spins. I would never have anticipated that we would still be in the midst of a global pandemic after nearly a year of dealing with it. I would never have anticipated that we would be going through efforts, evidently serious, as some people try to undo a national election in the United States of America. Those kinds of things just don’t happen in ordinary times.

Usually, as we close out one year and get ready to greet a new year, our thoughts turn to hope, new anticipations, new personal goals, and possibly those often-scoffed-at New Year’s resolutions. I’m not one to make fun of New Year’s resolutions, because I think hardly anything of high purpose is ever accomplished without some resolution, some commitment to a course of action, some motivation of anticipation and hope. So let’s make some good and serious New Year’s resolutions, for the sake of life and health and peace and progress.

And, although the song from which my “Long Time Passing” title comes is a kind of mournful lament about how human beings seem to perpetuate their miseries, a new year is an opportunity to not only hope for better days to come, but to commit to ways of thinking and living that have a chance of bringing about those better days.

Now that my wife Nancy and I are about to turn 81 years old (Jan. 4), and that we will soon be married for 60 years (Jan. 8), we kind of automatically look back on the years that have passed.

To me, time is somewhat of a mystery. It can pass quickly. It can pass slowly. It can carry good times. It can carry hard times. Or it can carry both at the same time.

When I was about to graduate from Pea Ridge High School in 1957, our principal, E.G. Howard, remarked to me one day, that, “Jerry, your life will speed up from here on. Time will move faster.”

I think he was speaking from the experience of being several years old himself, and today I would say that he was right on in that thought. I have sometimes remarked that it seemed like it took me 50 years to get through high school, and then it took only 20 years for the next 50 years to pass. Ain’t it funny how time slips away?!

Nancy and I married in January of 1961. I was too young then to get a marriage license in Arkansas without parental consent, so my Dad had to sign my application, even though I would turn 21 on Jan. 4 and we would be married on Jan. 8. That was kind of a strange reminder that at 21 we were quite young. I had spent my teen years thinking that 18-year-olds were so grown up and mature. Hmm!

Back in the 1960s, lots of people had the idea that when you turned 30 you were “over the hill.” I think that idea has kind of passed on. I hope it has. I think it was radio and TV personalty Art Linkletter who used to say that life begins at 80. Since I am now 80 myself, I like that idea that the senior years can be meaningful, even with the certain infirmities, creaking joints, hair turned white, balance not quite so good, and so on. As time has passed, our kids have accumulated some years themselves. If we live a few more years we may have kids who are becoming old retired folks along with us. As I write, I am looking at my PRHS graduating class picture.

There were 15 of us in that class of 1957. Seven of us are now deceased, and eight of us are still living. Graduating classes from Pea Ridge High School may soon be 10 times as large as our class was back then. That’s astonishing! Pea Ridge is now almost three times as large as Bentonville was when Sam and Helen Walton moved there in 1950. Amazing how things can change over the course of 70 years!

I have become fascinated with understanding better the historic calendars that have been used over the centuries by our civilizations, particularly the Jewish calendar, the Roman (or Julian) calendar, the Chinese calendar, and our current Gregorian calendar. It is particularly interesting to me how the various calendars deal with the fact that the years do not pass in exact whole days. Our current Gregorian calendar works by having 365 days in most years, but usually 366 days in every fourth year. (There are certain exceptions to that rule which come into play every 100th and 400th year.) But, for the lifetimes of most of us alive today, we won’t see those exceptions.

There have been many alternative calendars proposed through the years.

I am fascinated right now with the idea of a calendar that would always have 52 or 53 full weeks, so that the first day of the year would always fall on a Sunday, and every month would have either 28 days or 35 days (four weeks or five weeks). Instead of the Leap Day in February every four years, the alternative calendar I am looking at would have an extra full week (a Leap Week) every five or six years. Most years would have 364 days, some would have 371 (a week more) to adjust for the fractional day that the Earth has at the end of every year. Although the Earth varies somewhat in the exact length of the year in days, the average is very near 365.2421875 days per year (almost six hours over 365 days).

Is anyone interested in talking calendars?

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