This is the weekend we mess with time – and I’m loving every minute of it.
One second, just before turning in Saturday night, it was 11:03 p.m. The next, with objection from no one, it was 10:03. A bonus hour added to our lives, at least for now, to do with as we please.
As you can see, I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately.
I had way too much of it on my hands over the summer as I lay in bed, waylaid by the myriad maladies that may or may not have stemmed directly from the advanced case of melanoma that came knocking at my life’s door last January.
The frequent dizzy spells that kept me from driving and, on some days, even getting out of bed? Still not sure what caused them, but thank God for the steroid that finally made them stop.
The vertebrae fractures up and down my spine that came on without warning – I’ll never forget that one in the shower – and left me feeling like a slowly collapsing house of cards? Four times, surgery came to the rescue.
The endless itching brought on by my biweekly infusions of cancer-fighting Nivolumab? Turns out there’s a pill for that. In fact, as I survey the table next to my bed, I realize there’s a pill for just about everything.
Except for time, which in reality answers to no pill, no human intervention. Our biannual “daylight savings” delusion notwithstanding, it moves at its own inexorable pace, oblivious to our most fervent hopes, our darkest fears and those hedge bets we so euphemistically call our “plans for the future.”
Back in January, as I watched my time frame narrow before my eyes, my only real “plan” was to take one more ride in my boat. It’s a wooden, 1957 Lyman and at the time it was being masterfully restored up in the central Maine town of Wayne by Chris Cushman, owner of Androscoggin Wooden Boat Works.
I collected the boat – rechristened “Keep Punchin'” – in June. But then, too sick or weak to go outside and look at it, let alone take it out on the water, I lay there wondering if it all had been a fool’s errand, a mission impossible.
Then, just over a month ago, along came a good day. My wife, two sons and two old friends converged down at the landing on the Saco River and for three glorious hours, with the foliage reflecting off the glassy water and the sunlight gleaming off the freshly varnished mahogany deck, time seemed to stand still.
Now, emboldened by my boat ride, I have another plan. I say this fully aware that, as my cancer doc occasionally cautions me, “This is a very unpredictable cancer. Anything can happen at any time.”
Got it. But at the same time, get this: On or about March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, my son Eric and his beautiful wife, Jung, are due to welcome into the world a baby boy. He will be my first grandchild.
And I plan to make his acquaintance.
That’s 137 days from now. Days when the sun will rise late and set early. Days when the yard, now still clinging to the last vestiges of fall color, will surrender to the endless layers of ice and snow.
“Yes, you can use your snowblower,” my back doctor told me on Friday. “As long as you use it and don’t fight with it. Once you start fighting it, that’s when you’ll get into trouble!”
So here I sit, propped up against what I’ve come to call “Pillow Mountain,” once again banging away at the keyboard without a clue what lies ahead.
Some people, bless them every one, have a problem with that. Like the guy who emailed me after my column reappeared recently, “Just when I thought you went to the great beyond you rear your ugly head.”
“Modern medicine,” I wrote back. “Must drive you nuts.”
As for me, I don’t have time for all that negativity. I’ll wake up this morning grateful for that extra hour of sleep – if that’s what it really was. And I’ll shake my head in mock amazement this afternoon as the shadows lengthen far ahead of their time.
Last Wednesday, just before the remnants of Hurricane Patricia hit, Eric and I hooked the boat and trailer up to the pickup and hurried it over to a storage warehouse in Portland. There it will stay, safe and secure, for the winter.
“We want to have everything out of here by May 1,” the manager reminded me after we covered the boat and I handed him the check.
I almost started to explain how I might be the one to pick up the boat or, depending on how things go, it could be someone else. But then I stopped myself, saying only, “Will do.”
Time will tell.
But I plan to take my grandson for a boat ride.
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