What Goes Around...

Big Wheel Keeps On Turnin'...

I got flipped off by a twenty-something motor-head the other day.

I was running down the freeway doing 75 or 80 in the passing lane (those trooper plates come in handy sometimes) when this chick comes screaming up behind me in a bright red Hyundai, tailgates me (and I mean sitting right on my ass) for a couple of miles and then starts flashing her lights and honking her horn. Now, I’m moving along at a pretty good clip. Traffic is fairly heavy over there in the slowpoke lane and there isn’t really a place to pull in to let her by. But she persists and finally I get out of her way.  As she whizzes by me, she turns, sneers, flips me off, and with a shake of her pony tail disappears down the road.

My initial fury at the chutzpah of this chick caused me to reach for the radio to alert the barrack to be on the lookout for a red Hyundai headed east at a high rate, but something stopped me. I thought about it for a minute and as my fury cooled down to a slow burn, I remembered days thirty-five or so years ago when that kid in the red Hyundai would have been me. Only then it was a ‘58 Dodge station wagon with the pushbutton transmission and fins way out to there.  I paid eighty-five bucks for it in the summer of my junior year in high school. The thing had so much play in the steering wheel you could make a quarter revolution before the front end responded. But it was my chariot, man. I was indestructible (come to think of it, probably more so in that beast than the chick in the brand new Hyundai) and drove at break-neck speed. Back then I was in a hurry to go everywhere - to where I was going, to get out of school, to grow up - I went as fast as I could. That ol’ Dodge would get behind some poor ol’ geezer on the road and flash its lights and honk its horn (with a little help from yours truly) so it could get by that highway snail in front of it as fast as it could. Yeah, those were the days. I worked so hard to make things go so fast.

After the pony tail flipped me off, I realized that the tables had been turned without my knowing it.  Now I was the geezer desperately trying to slow things down.

There is a nebulous sadness about it all - thoughts about how much time has gone by and how much time is left - and what have I done with it? Some of it has been good. Some of it has been bad. Perhaps the need to slow down now is about getting control of the quality things and living them as fully as possible - all those things I let slide by so long ago because I didn’t think they were that important at the moment.  Hell, I had plenty of time to enjoy them later. Back then I just wanted to go, go, go. Now all I want to do is slow it all down. 

Now, life is pulling me along instead of me pushing, and things are going by faster and faster.  Most of those things going by so fast are not chicks in little red cars. They are whole days, weeks, and months. I’ve been married a year to a wonderful woman, and it seems like we were married just yesterday. July is half over already, and I’m wondering where the time has gone.

I’ve heard about this from older members of my congregation. Now I’m experiencing it.

Life is whispering in my ear, "Enjoy it while you still can!"

I’m listening now, and wondering how.

God! The last thirty-five or forty years have just whizzed by! How many more? Twenty? Thirty? Maybe, if I’m lucky, forty? I used to think eighty-five was ancient. That’s thirty years from now for me. Forty years ago it was forever to fifty-five. But now, eighty-five could just as easily be tomorrow, with not a damn hint of a promise that I’ll see it.

Maybe today really is pretty good.  Maybe I should stop worrying about tomorrow and let the remaining hours of this evening be the best I’ve ever had. There’s a sense that tomorrow just might not come, now.

That’s something new. Something I’m sure a perky blonde in a bright red Hyundai isn’t thinking a bit about.

Yet.

Peace. Now. This instant.

Bo

8:34:41 PM
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