I guess it was all of that talk last week about the blue moon. When I strolled out late one night last week, I looked at that beautiful full moon but it sure as hell was not blue. So I looked it up and learned that a blue moon is the appearance of the 3rd full moon in a season that has 4 full moons, instead of the usual 3. However, it is not visually blue. Because a blue moon occurs only every 2 or 3 years, the term blue moon is used colloquially to mean a rare event, as in the phrase “once in a blue moon”. Anyway, that’s the explanation I picked up on the Internet.
Now, having gotten that out of the way, I focused on the “every 2 or 3 years” part and thought I hope I’m still here when it rolls around again. All of which started me to think about time in our lives and how it moves so slowly when you’re young but as you age, particularly at this late time, how it breathlessly accelerates to a point of not always knowing what day it is or what days just passed.
How about our “kids” and their kids. Only yesterday we were helping them with homework, taking them to and watching them play baseball and soccer and cradling them and their’s in our arms. Now “suddenly” they have independent lives of their own.
Sitting in most of those public school and even college classes, the clock seemed never to move and the days seemed never to end for me. And when I started out in what I thought was going to be a career in Accounting, the days dragged tortuously. Working on the minute financial details of that profession, particularly when starting out was brutal for me. One of my first assignments was at Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn doing a payroll account bank reconciliation that had not been done for 3 years. I remember being led into a large conference room with a long table covered completely with piles of cancelled checks. When you consider that the average number of employees was 2,000 and that there was more than a 75% turnover of personnel each month, that task was not fun. And I have to tell you that the hours and days never seemed to end. I also have to tell you that since it took close to a year for me to complete it, that assignment killed any desire I had to remain in the profession.
Then, of course, there is that year + time I spent in Korea; particularly the northeast, “frozen” mountains. When under attack, the time flew by. The majority of our time there and at Koje Doh, the prisoner’s island, however, involved unbelievably boring, “make work “ projects that made our time spent there seem like a century.
Later on, even when I was selling IBM mainframe services and software applications for ITT, time continued to drag. Sitting in a meeting with Shell Oil (then headquartered at Rockefeller Center), I struggled to stay awake as our mathematicians and statisticians discussed with Shell senior executives the designing and implementing of a linear programming-based system for optimizing the mixture of gasoline. As I learned then, there are almost unlimited mixtures that can go into formulating the gas that we put in our cars. The idea was to have a system that would daily analyze the costs of the myriad of elements to be mixed, and list the most profitable mixture for that day. Hey! That was an historic breakthrough in the use of computers and should have been an exciting time. In retrospect it was, but still young then and not being a mathematician or systems expert, that day seemed to last “forever”.
And so it went until the years started to mount. And then when I hit ages 60 and 70, I noticed that the days seemed to pass very quickly. Although I certainly was no busier than in younger years, I could not believe how time and the years were flying by. Today when I do a checkup, annual or quarterly, with a doctor or dentist, I feel that I was there “yesterday”. My monthly VFW meetings seem weekly, and my attendance at some past event seems like yesterday. And when I am on the computer as I am now, I can start in the morning and when I look up again its late afternoon. I guess the best example was the time I spent recovering from a detached Retina surgery by keeping my head facedown in a padded circular device (I called it a padded toilet seat) for some 16 hours a day. Worried that I might not make it through the 2 weeks of boredom, I could not believe that the days shot by so quickly. As to those weekly visits to the Combat Veterans Court in Santa Ana as a mentor, the days fly by so quickly those visits seem at times to be almost a daily occurrence.
What is of concern to me is that that “final day” is going to be upon me before I know it. So, I better get busy and finish up those things that I want to do. The BW and I, thinking of doing some kind of trip in a few months, I guess I better start packing now so that I will be ready. There are some thoughts and stories that need writing, expressions of encouragement and hope for some people I know in distress, some incomplete business transactions and additional expressions of affection for those I love and am fond of. I better get moving now for time is racing by like you would not believe. Who knows? I may get to see that every-2-or-3-years-blue-moon in a “week” or 2.
