TIME

Somehow three years have slipped by since I last wrote. How did that happen so fast without me noticing? Time is a strange and elusive thing, much like water. It's powerful, difficult to grasp, constantly changing, and manages to leak or evaporate out when trying to hold it back. It can take on any form imaginable and can be a good or bad force... sometimes it works for you and at other times, it works against you.

A week ago today, my husband and I drove to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, to see my orthopedic-oncologist, Dr. Herbert Schwartz, for the last time! I had been a patient of his since 2002, when he performed limb-salvage surgery on my left forearm. I had a lemon-size cancerous tumor in my inner arm, just below the elbow called a soft-tissue sarcoma. It's a very rare and aggressive cancer and usually isn't detected until it has reached advanced stages.  Anyway, Dr. Schwartz released me from his care, and I am considered cured. But, I digress.  My point is that the past ten years have flown by and I find myself asking, "How did that happen so fast without me noticing?"  

My father was a stickler for being on time. When I was 18 and came home from a date 5 minutes past my curfew, my father was waiting up for me and he was not happy. I walked in and he launched into one his famous lectures. I protested that I was only 5 minutes late. He said that one minute past curfew is late and that being on time did not mean that I was in a car in the driveway, on the porch, or in the doorway. He said that being on time meant that I was in the house no later than the specified time, period! A few years before that, our family was preparing to leave home to spend a day on a nearby lake on our cabin cruiser. I was warned repeatedly by my mother and father as to how much time I had left before we were to leave. When the family filed out to the car to leave, I was busy searching for my tennis shoes and when I found them and went out the front door, they were nowhere in sight! I'd been left alone to contemplate the cost of not being timely. Lesson learned.

So, in early November, I will celebrate my 60th (gasp) birthday. Whoa!  How did that happen so fast without me noticing? Well, I really did notice recently in a big way. A twenty-something female offered me her seat at a party and called me a four-letter word... dare I say it?... "Ma'am"! I know she was being kind and thoughtful and sweet but I wanted to look her in the eyes and scream at her to not Ma'am me! Instead, I smiled my best fake smile, declined her seat, and thanked her. I told myself that I had survived a lot of things over the years that have made me smarter, stronger, wiser, and a much more interesting woman. I'm blessed to still be here and time has been a friend of mine. As for the future, I'm ready for whatever the passage of time brings me.

As a long-time fan of Pink Floyd, I'll leave you with an excerpt of the lyrics to their "Time". It says it so well:

TIME

"Tired of lying in the sunshine

staying home to watch the rain

you are young and life is long

and there is time to kill today

And then one day you find

ten years have got behind you

no one told you when to run

you missed the starting gun."

To sleep, perchance to dream

I created my first blog only a few short hours ago. Here I am writing again and the sun's not up yet. After sleeping for a few short hours and too much cover-fighting, I gave up and got up. Sleeping used to be one of the things I did best. As an infant, I slept around the clock. During my teen years, I could easily sleep till noon, or even later if allowed to do so. But, somewhere along the way, my ability to sleep has changed.

I've been known to sleep on my school desk, sleep sitting at my computer (on the job!), sleep through a street full of fire trucks and police cars charging around, and even through violent thunder storms complete with lightning. In my early twenties, I sat on a jury and cat napped my way through the criminal trial. Before the jury retired to deliberate the case, the judge said that I would be happy to learn that my name had been drawn as the extra, expendible juror. He then announced, to my horror, that I was free to leave the courthouse, go home, and get some sleep.

"They" say that as you get older, you need less sleep. I want to know who "they" are and where "they" got that idea. As I've gotten older, I have less energy and find that I need more sleep. However, I hope that "they" are correct. There are nights when I lie awake because it's a few degrees too warm in the room, or my pillow's not fluffed perfectly. Then there are times when I can't sleep because my husband is snoring or I have an ache somewhere. I can only hope that if the list of petty nuisances continues to grow, it will not do so faster than I age and supposedly need less sleep.

Now that I am retired from my office job and can spend my days as I please, I have more time to sleep than ever before. Isn't it ironic that "they" say I now need less of it? Such is life. We're supposed to get some rain this afternoon and that will be the perfect time for a lovely nap.