IT’S ABOUT TIME

Time has always made me crazy. There’s never enough. I schedule my daily activities because time’s a wasting, and then I go hard, till I collapse. I get impatient when people don’t show on time, when my order takes too long, when I can’t click off the items on my lists.

Since I’ve retired, I have more free time, but I’m also increasingly aware that my time on earth is getting shorter, and that I’m wasting it. And I see how much I waste time by thinking about wasting it. This ever-present dilemma makes me crazy in an older way.

Music helps me when I’m crazy. So I’m making a Retirement CD. Ed and I made a CD nine years ago for our twenty-fifth anniversary, using music from our early years, including two versions of “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” by Aretha Franklin and Willy Nelson. We still listen to it. It helps us remember who we were. A Retirement CD will, I figure, help sound out who we are now.

I’m the song chooser, with Ed’s agreement. And I know time will be a focus of the songs I choose. Picking the songs makes me sit up and pay attention, since I’m matching moments with music and want the music to reflect our world. I have ten songs in mind.

Van Morrison’s “These are the Days” is poignant and gorgeous and makes me cry. These are the days of the endless summer. There’s only here. There’s only now. There’s even a sparkling river in this song, like the one outside our door.

My mornings are workout and coffee and books and breakfast and prepping in the kitchen for dinner tonight, and how did it get to be eleven o’clock, it’s writing time already? “59^th Bridge Street Song” reminds me to slow down, you’re moving too fast. You got to make the morning last, and when Simon and Garfunkel say they’re feeling groovy, I both cringe at the phrase and, like, get where they’re coming from, Man.

Jim Croce wants to save “Time in a Bottle” and, oh, so do I. Ed Sheeran, in “Thinking Out Loud,” promises I’ll be loving you till I’m seventy. My seventy-two year old Ed and I know it will be even longer than that.

Mick Jagger is seventy-three, and though I’ll always love his mouth, I decided against “Time is On My Side.” I’m not so sure it is. In “September Song”, Frank Sinatra croons that the days dwindle down to a precious few. They do.

Leon Redbone’s “Lazy Bones” speaks to those afternoon naps we can’t resist. Like Jonathan Edwards, Ed and I “Lay Around the Shanty” a lot. And, like the Indigo Girls in “Closer to Fine,” we’ve quit looking for definite answers to the big questions and are all the better for it. Kay Kyser’s “Coffee Time” makes me smile because, you know, coffee.

And then there’s The Sub-Dudes’ “All the Time in the World”. It makes me sing and dance, and it almost convinces me, for a moment, that I have enough time in this lifetime.

Almost.

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