Blink & You’ll Miss It

Saw a young woman in the grocery store parking lot. She was trying to hustle three kids into the back of a mini-van.

Two of them were doing okay, but a boy of about five years old was screaming as if he swallowed the sun.

Mom wasn’t paying him any attention at all. She loaded a bag into the back seat and glanced at me as I strolled on by.

She laughed and rolled her eyes at her screaming boy.

“He’s a picnic,” she said.

“I have three kids too,” I said. “They’re older now. Still drive me nuts.”

“Oh God,” she answered. “I’ve been living with the idea that if enough time passes it’ll get better.”

That was our moment in time, and eventually I noticed that she got the kid into the car and buckled up.

I thought about how quickly we went from trying to get screaming kids into the car to wondering what time the knuckleheads were going to get home.

An eye blink.

It made me sad for a moment because I saw that woman as. Young Mom with her really young children and she saw me as an old guy, snickering at her predicament.

And the twinge of sadness came in knowing that all that she and her young family was going to face were things we’ve already been through.

It’s their turn.

The thing is, I was enjoying her struggle because it was all so familiar.

Sam once popped Jake in the nose during a long car ride causing a panic as the blood flowed.

I can still hear the cries coming from everyone in the car as I tried to drive and keep everything calm.

That was about twenty years ago.

Feels like twenty minutes.

And what’s weird about thinking about twenty years go is that you start thinking about twenty years forward too and how many twenty year spans are there left??

Not two!

I’d be 97 years old with two more twenty year spans!

I guess, the moral of the story is that time waits for no one.

It speeds right on by.

And the things we lived through are being tackled by a whole new group of people.

We don’t get re-dos.

We don’t go back in time.

Life just goes flying on by.

Live it!