Time and space

Went to the Met yesterday for the first time since I've lived in the city. I had an odd feeling being there--that I was sort of a residential tourist. Yes, I only had to walk out my front door and get on a 6 train for about 4 stops to wind up at 82nd and 5th. And I had no backpack, no video camera, no accent from Omaha or Osaka. But even after seven months, I still feel like a guy from Boston walking around in New York. That got me thinking about the odd way that time and space have of playing with our minds. As someone who spent the early part of his life, moving from place to place about every 3 years, I find that it is hard for me to gauge time accurately in a given place any longer. Maybe it's the necessary characteristic of the chameleon that I took on when growing up in order to survive that gives me this wierd sense that wherever I am, I've always been. It doesn't feel like seven months. It feels much longer. And yet, particularly in a place like New York, where you don't earn your stripes and the right to actually call yourself a new yorker until you've been here for 15-20 years, I don't feel like I've been here for very long at all. Maybe it's the New York State of Mind.

And then there's also the ongoing march of adulthood that makes everything seem to go by with mind-numbing speed. As a kid, 7 months could be an eternity. 7 months was the difference between being an elementary school student and a middle schooler, between an eighth grader and a freshman, etc. 7 months was a very serious relationship. 7 months was veteran status on any job.

Now 7 months is a layover at the airport. It's 7 months closer to the empty nest. It's 7 months that I haven't been in school. It's 7 months that I've been moving so quickly and learning so much that I feel like I've gone nowhere and learned nothing.

But 7 months is the difference between being the parent of one to being the parent of 2. Life now seems to be blowing by. I don't want to slow it down, or maybe I simply acknowledge that I can not. I just want to make sure that I'm not missing it, not whittling it away watching meaningless television, not blogging while I should be working...

You get the point.