Time flies

There's gonna be a potluck Aug. 29. I'm supposed to bring a hotdish, a chair, my own BEVERAGE, and my husband. Well, it's at 3 p.m., so I don't know if my husband can show up on time. After all, he's a working man. But the hosts don't really care. After all, this is for teachers, former ones, that is. Retired teachers, to be more specific.

Why a potluck on a Wednesday afternoon at 3 p.m. Aug. 29? Seems like a strange time until the hostess with the mostess, Linda Hunt, informed me yesterday that it's the day before all the other teachers have to go back to work. So, all the old school farts are gonna sit back on their lawn chairs, nibble, sip, and sigh about how sad it is that another school year will be starting without us.

Hard to believe this is the fifth time school has started without me. In fact, it's gone by so fast that I was telling everyone this spring that I'd retired four years ago. I really thought it was only four years until the college commencement invitations from students I'd had as juniors arrived in the mail.

One night in early May, I was thinking about Logan Free's upcoming graduation at Georgia Southern where she'd been a standout softball pitcher and a good student, to boot. Then, I got to thinking that she must have graduated in just three years. I was pretty impressed until I did some subtraction. Logan was a junior my last year of teaching. That was 2002. When you subtract 2002 from 2007, you get 5.

That moment of math practice told me I could still cipher, but more important it hit me between the eyes. That was the very moment when I first realized that the time surely is slipping away---and much too fast. I can't believe I've been away from teaching for five years, but the calendar and my math tell it IS so.

I'm almost afraid to blink. Two years of life could speed by in that millisecond, and those early September days signaling the return of the bad stomach, the insomnia and the constant need to keep trudging forward or you'll get behind will seem a long, long way back in the past instead of "just yesterday."

What is it about this retirement time that allows those same Monday-Friday days when we were operating strictly by the clock, often counting the minutes, to suddenly pay no heed to time? Nowadays, they start early in the morning when we shoot out of bed with an urgency of not wanting to waste a minute. Suddenly they're over when we're slouched on the couch, drifting off into Never Never Land while Larry King interviews Tammy Faye Baker or Myrv Griffin's friends---at 9 o'clock, of course.

When the dried-up August lawns, bright red tomatoes and yellow school buses doing their trial runs down country roads remind us that another school year is about to begin, I do think about the things I won't miss by not showing up at Sandpoint High School one more time to scare the beejeebers out of another crop of kids who will soon learn that the bark's a lot gruffer than the growl. But I don't think about it for long.

After all, life is slipping by. To ponder too long might mean another day suddenly gone, another day closer to the time when we won't care anymore.

Hence, I say "Carpe Diem!" I'll go to Ron and Linda's Wednesday afternoon party and help my old teaching friends celebrate another year without bells and classroom clocks directing our every move.