Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly flow the days
Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers
Blossoming even as they gaze
Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly fly the years
One season following another
Laden with happiness and tears
— “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof,
lyrics by Sheldon Harnick
As I begin this on the last day of January, that master painter, the sun, has tinted the clouds a vivid tangerine as it rises behind the little woods at the back of our property. The orange tint of the clouds is faintly reflected onto the snowy ground. As all sunrises must, it is fading, but the glow stored in the sunrise/sunset trunk in my mental attic remains.
It’s hard to believe that Christmas has passed, and here we are at Valentine’s Day when people’s thoughts turn to love, and they give each other cards, chocolates, boxer shorts with hearts on them or cheesecake nighties.
Swiftly fly the years, indeed! This will be the 51st Valentine’s Day that Bill and I shall celebrate. So long ago and yet it seems like only yesterday! Unlike physical objects whose depth, breadth and length we can see and quantify, time is an invisible, untouchable dimension. Oh, homo sapiens — thinking man and the most intelligent being in nature — has devised clocks and calendars to subdivide time into units, but no device or mathematical unit can truly define it. Furthermore, we cannot save it. We must spend all that we are granted.
I asked my nephew, John Jones, to calculate the time that has passed since that first Valentine’s Day with Bill: 18,982 days, 624 months, 2,712 weeks, 455,576 hours, 27,334,555 minutes and 1,650,073,294 seconds.
Think of it! Nearly 20,000 days, hours in the hundreds of thousands, minutes in the millions, seconds in the billions! That seems like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, that depends on your perspective, does it not? When I was a child a day seemed like eternity, and now a day passes at the speed of a jet plane.
We cannot slow or halt time’s passage. Eek! John wrote, “This isn’t totally accurate as time is still moving on, so the numbers are continually increasing.” It’s rather daunting to think that willy-nilly my time is moving on. Perhaps trying to calculate how many Valentine’s Day Fannie Mae chocolates I’ve consumed during those years would be less intimidating.
The most unforgettable valentine that Bill ever gave me was a large card that unfolded to form an Eiffel Tower. He said, “I thought that we might go on a Road Scholar Tour of impressionistic art.” We spent a week in France, listening to an expert lecture about the Impressionists in the morning and then being taken in the afternoon to the locales where they painted. Whenever we had free time, we took a train into Paris thirty miles away. That was one of the best weeks of our life together.
The events of our travel through time are often random and unpredictable. Retracing my journey along the highways and byways of my life, if there is such a thing as luck I was lucky to have met Bill and to have shared a life with far more happiness than tears.
Considering the number of divorces, one might wonder how in the world two such independent and strong-minded people as we managed to last this long. There was a lot more than luck involved. Keeping a marriage together through all those hours and years involves effort, tenacity and patience. No matter how well you know each other, committing to a marriage is an leap of faith and hope. It is said in the Bible’s Book of Corinthians, “. . . Love never fails . . . And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” Love is the glue that has kept us together. wclarke@comcast.net