2015.
Another year, another ... $365. Once again the holidays have come and gone in a blur - another Jackie Lawson Advent Calendar come and gone in a blink of an eye. Haven't even finished putting up all the decorations and now it's time to start taking them back down again, and time to get that problematic leaning Tower of Christmas Tree out of the house and to the curb for composting. The Winter cold seems to finally be arriving, but before we know it will be giving way to another summer of Hershey Park and Dutch Wonderland visits (this time with the Abbster in tow instead of "in the oven"), which will be over before we can even blink, and then once again the lights will be coming out of the box and heading right into the trash as yet another string magically stops working during their 11 month hibernation.
Except for those Hersheypark Kiss lights. They'll be hitting the big 2-0 this year, and despite some being a little worse for the wear, they have been as reliable as Old Faithful every time plug meets outlet. Not one bulb burned out after 19 seasons - knock on wood! Hard to imagine having those lights nearly half of my life. Kinda makes me wonder where in the hell a decade has gone. It almost seems like we went from the 90's right into '10's, like we skipped right over the "aughts." Reading a book, or watching a movie, or listening to a song, or playing a video game - each seeming like they had just come out not too long ago brings the shock that they are nigh on two decades old at this point. Two decades of sitting on a shelf while the daily routine marches on, as it seems time itself has been sucked away into some mysterious void in between turning off the alarm, heading to work, eating dinner, and falling asleep on the couch, only to hear that alarm way too soon again.
Where did the "Double 0" decade go? Erin's hitting the double digits this year, yet flipping through pictures in albums or on the computer only bring the vaguest of memories of those days when she was still not even old enough to walk. Those early days of starting a website to fight the nonsense of celebrating the wrong year for the new millennium to watching the Twin Towers fall. Can a tragedy of such magnitude erase a decade of time from our lives?
Hersheypark has some old pictures up around the park, showing scenes from its early days. Some of those pictures capture random people in a moment in time. We have a jigsaw puzzle of old American Indian cave dwellings that do the same thing. Every time I see such pictures I often wonder what the people in those pictures where thinking at that moment in time. If often wonder where they might be now. Obviously many, if not all, are no longer on this earth. I wonder what they would think if they knew they were being memorialized for decades into the future while just going about their business on a day that was no different than any other.
Memories are fading, some of them thankfully so. Yet many others remain that I wish would join them, and others I want to hold on to forever have gone so completely that not even pictures can conjure up the feelings of the time in which they were snapped. Some seem so dreamlike, one has to wonder whether they really happened at all or if they were indeed figments of the imagination. More than ever I start to feel like the Professor in The Bishop's Wife, wondering if I will ever have the time to finish the things I haven't even started yet and wishing that there were some angel come to reassure me that time isn't really speeding up on us all year after year, like a runaway car on a downhill slope. The Earth may be slowing down, but the passage of time certainly does not seem to follow along.
So many things to be happy and proud about, and an equal number of regrets. Regrets can gnaw at you and send you from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows, wondering what would be if a different path had been chosen - turning left instead of right. Would that have made a difference in the end? Would things be better now or could they have become much worse. Where did the time go? How can one be sure they are stopping to take in each and every important moment when those moments of the past are gone and they swore they were doing it then? How can we so easily lose a decade of time?
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