Slightly Cursed

Time.

Ticking away, faster each year. Too much gone by; too little left ahead. Relentless.

Life is a series of epiphanies. Like anything else, you have good ones and bad ones. But when we finally face that moment–when our vision clears, and the pieces of the puzzle snap and lock in place in our heads, and suddenly we know there’s nothing left for us to do except to take action and to face the monumental changes ahead–why do so many people discount the experiences before the realization?

You can look back and say, “I was a fool! I wasted too much time!” But was any of it really wasted? The very concept demeans us. I prefer to think of it as time needed to learn and grow.

Everyone has a journey to complete. Birth, death, marriage, divorce, endings, new beginnings, change of any kind. It’s all cyclical. Our paths converge and diverge with others’ as we complete smallerмебели cycles of our lives within the grander cycle of birth to death. With every path we cross or join, lessons are both taken and given. Every experience is designed to teach, and to learn.

Sometimes, we cross another’s path and move on, only to converge with them again years later. Maybe the timing wasn’t right. There were lessons to be learned before the two paths could come together as one. Is the time wasted? Is it a test of patience bringing us one step closer to enlightenment?

There’s a right time for everything. That thing, that job, that lover. It may not have been right for you ten or twenty years ago, but it might be exactly what you need tomorrow. Maybe you knew what the right choice was all that time ago, but you were afraid or blinded by distractions. Or not ready. Perhaps the lessons in between were required first. Patience. Another lesson from Time?

We take our experiences with us as we forge our way through time. They are us, in part, in whole, inextricable. Time’s never wasted, no matter how trivially spent, no matter how successful the final outcome. We learn to use it wisely, to make the most of it. We learn when to break old cycles and start new ones. We move with it. Changing. Growing. It mends our broken hearts and softens the memories that cut deepest.

Time is a gift. One that should be used with wisdom and care. Time can’t be stolen, but it can be lost. Time is that most precious of commodities, valued most when none is left. When it’s lost it’s gone forever, but the memories and the lessons learned are always with us. Defining us. Making us who we are.

Time moves forward. Will you?

written by vic

It was 4:00am and my husband was underneath the pickup with a die grinder, cut-off saw, and a flashlight. That wasn’t supposed to happen. What was supposed to happen was that he’d backed the truck gently up to the fifth-wheel, and things would go click! Then we’d be on our way.

We rarely take family vacations, mostly because of fear. But despite our completely justified apprehension, we’d decided to take the kids to Florida. It was to be a trip to the keys for some deep sea fishing on my brother’s boat with plenty of lazing around on sandy beaches. We’d hit Disney and Sea World on the way back.

Everything was already packed into our gigantic, 35ft. long fifth wheel; all that was left was to hook the trailer to the truck. We’d peeled our children off the walls and duct taped them to their beds, then set our alarm clock so we could get an early start.

But no. Instead, the truck was leaking stuff out of its rear end. After several hours of banging, grinding, and bleeding, the husband declared that the truck was good to go. He aired up a mysteriously flat tire, then we hooked the trailer to the truck and set out on our family vacation. Finally. Yay, us!

Halfway to Ann Arbor (about 12 miles from home), the truck started making scary grindy noises. My clue circuit told me that we were in for an adventure. Since we were dragging a 3.5 ton lump of metal behind us and like to live, we quickly found a convenient place to stop. We didn’t want to leave the trailer unattended in an enormous hotel parking lot, so I stayed behind to be rubbernecked at while the husband and four children limped back home in the truck at 15mph. Eleventy-billion hours later, they were back and we were (yet again) Florida-bound! I could actually see extra grey hairs in my husband’s receding hairline, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t want to know why.

We whipped through Ohio then dragged ass across Kentucky, finally landing in Tennessee. Then everything went wrong all at once. In what could only have been a cosmic effort to ruin our family vacation, the air conditioning in the truck stopped working and the brakes on the fifth-wheel went out just as the scary noises returned. Louder. And grindier.

Again, we stopped. My husband crawled under the truck with a large collection of impressive, manly-looking tools. He reemerged, not having used any of them. This couldn’t be good.

Stuffing several dozen tools, a wad of baling wire, and a roll of duct tape into the magical little universes he calls pockets, he pronounced, “We need a new rear end, but I got the brakes fixed – the wire was loose.” I ignored what he said and focused on the pockets. They weren’t even bulging! “Since we’re screwed anyway, I vote we keep driving as far as we can. Or until we get to a place that’s more convenient to be screwed in.” I couldn’t fault his logic, so on we drove; the scary whiney-grindy sound threatened us with impending catastrophe. We exited Tennessee with a sigh of relief. And that’s when Georgia grabbed hold of us and refused to let us go.

So there we were, stranded in the middle of the toothless belt at an RV park owned by a three hundred year old woman and her brotheruncledad, pretending everything was ok for a night. I’m pretty sure I heard banjos dueling in the night. In retrospect, I believe that Tennessee had only been trying to warn us.

It took hours to find a junkyard with a rear differential that would fit an F-350 with duallies. Luckily, one junkyard in the entire Atlanta area had exactly what we needed. Three sweaty, unairconditioned hours later, we were a little bit poorer. When my husband found out that the owners of the junkyard were Nigerian immigrants, he amused himself telling jokes about email scam letters. It was only a little disturbing that everyone there was well versed in the subject, even the 11 year old boy who was playing with our kids.

Renting a car so we could continue on to Florida, we dropped the truck (and another wad of vacation money) off with a local mechanic. So we drove down to Orlando.

Two days later we picked up the truck and tried again; five miles north of the Florida border the brakes on the fifth-wheel gave out. The RV never made it south of the Georgia state line, but at least the truck was fixed! We spent the next few days having a terrific time at the various theme parks in Florida.

Several days later, and with only two more break-downs under our belts, our family (and the stray cat we’d picked up along the way) arrived home tired, hungry, and reeking of sweat. Once the kids were fed, everyone had showered, and the police had left, the husband and I curled up with the kids to watch The Incredible Hulk before passing out from exhaustion. We woke up the next day happy to see the children had survived the night.

We think the kids had a good time. It’s hard to tell. They haven’t asked to go on vacation since. We think it’s fear.

written by vic