They say time heals all wounds. They, whoever “they” are, also say time is the enemy. Time is on your side. There’s no time like the present. Time will tell.
So many contradictions. Take your time. Don’t waste time. Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted time. The best of times; the worst of times.
Time flies. Time is money. The times they are a-changin’.
When you really think about it though, what the heck is time anyway? Is it an illusive indefinable force, like, say, gravity?
Is time linear, stretching out in front of and behind us like Hwy 2 between Calgary and Edmonton, minutes flying by like speeding cars?
Or are moments piled one on top of the other and side by side, linking together like Lego? If so, what does a lifetime look like? And what in the world is each of us building hour upon hour, day after day?
Or does everything exist all at once, like the musical finish of the Beatles song A Day in a Life where every single and separate instrument in the London Symphony Orchestra is simultaneously played through its own scale from the lowest note to the highest note, each at a random time and tempo all at once until gloriously screaming to the magnificent climactic finale? And then the magical, majestic resolving chord hitting like an explosion, dying slowly into silence. Like the big bang that will someday end all of time forever? Some days it sure feels like it.
So many questions without answers. So many answers without questions.
As the great rock band Chicago sang, “Does anybody really know what time it is?” Another interesting question without an answer, but one thing is for sure: Time: there’s never enough of it. Or there’s too much. Depending.
I remember going to Camp Kannawin out on the north side of Sylvan Lake, where in the summer of Grade 7, two weeks at summer camp seemed like two short days. And those two days flew by as only a co-ed summer camp can when you are a kid having the time of your life.
We staying in wooden cabins along a path overlooking the lake, and the cabins were old even then. Neat thing was, they had big wooden bunk beds around the walls that were – get this – triples. Beds stacked three high!
I got the top bunk, with the excellent wooden ladder, cozy up there with my red cloth sleeping bag, happy as a clam. The nights flew by.
Every morning? Swimming. Compulsory swimming in the lake, which by anybody’s standards was always several degrees below human tolerance. But somehow, I would wade in, tender feet on the sharp rocks, wincing and shivering and then someone would start splashing one of the girls and the frigid water fight began and suddenly you were having so much fun you forgot you were turning as blue as ice. And then in a frozen flash it was over.
The campfires. Warbling away on the obligatory Kumbaya and the camp classics like Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore and Puff the Magic Dragon, managing to negotiate a seat on a log beside that cute girl from Calgary. But in an instant all the nightly campfires were cold too.
The mess hall where we all gathered to eat, gravitating to our tight groups of new friends, loosening the salt shaker lids and dripping vinegar into the pitchers of water. Then two weeks of happy mess hall mayhem suddenly disappeared like the last package of green licorice shoe laces at the tuck shop.
The hikes through the woods, making Bannock on a stick, and of course, raiding the girls’ cabins. I remember thinking, on the way home in the car with my mom and dad - how did the time go so fast?
But then again, there was one kid I remember well. Everybody called him “Specks” on account of his thick glasses. He was a quiet kid, dead centre in the category of ageek from the Planet Nerd.
He got the bottom bunk that nobody else wanted in one the cabin that wasn’t on the lakeshore.
He couldn’t swim, and when he stood reluctantly in the freezing lake up to his knocking knobby knees for compulsory swimming, guess who got splashed worst?
At the campfires, the thick smoke always billowed directly his way, and so nobody sat anywhere near Specks, the official smoke magnet. He didn’t have a regular group to sit with in the mess hall, and the licorice was always gone when he lined up at the tuck shop.
And he was never invited to join in raiding the girls’ cabins.
As summer camp kids do, we exchanged addresses with everybody when camp was over, most of which were promptly lost or ignored, so I was surprised when I got a letter in the mail. Snail mail being all the rage in those days on account of nobody had invented word-carrying electricity yet.
It was a short note from Specks, asking how I was doing, and if I was going to go to camp next year, and saying that he wasn’t going to come back. He said: “Summer camp was the longest two weeks of my life.”
Curious thing, time.
Like everything else, it’s all in the way you see it, I guess. Perhaps publisher Malcolm Forbes put it best: “There is never enough time, unless you’re serving it.”
Harley Hay is a local filmmaker and freelance writer.