Last night, I was looking at digital pics me and my partner had taken with several nieces and grandchildren when for a brief moment, it felt like we were really there, on one fine Sunday afternoon enjoying our usual karaoke session with the rest of the clan. Even the warm air in the lanai felt real to the skin. Then, as though sucked out and suddenly thrown into hyperspace, the return from reverie to real-time lays it down quite hard; the kids in the photos have all grown and most of the nieces and nephews have already gotten married with kids of their own.
The sensation is always like that of sitting in the window seat of the car and watching the sceneries flash by. Even as one knows full well time never stops, it’s always surprising, you never expect it to really be that fast. Inside the car, the seeming permanence of sitting comfortably in the cab can fool one into thinking the scene outside is stationary like they are. Only a fool thinks that way, you might say and asks what was I thinking? The wifey beside you agrees and says we always think of the grown kids as still little cute babies in our mind’s eye you know. And to that, you add, “why, in my dreams, our grown boy is always four years old”. Such fools we must be.
Then somehow in the end, everything discussed is validated every time one hears the most overused and scripted exclamation of all: oh my, how you have grown! And the cycle begins again.
Several years into the future, when the mind again goes back to reviewing the pleasant memories of the little rugrats of the past, it will do away with whatever updated image they’ve grown into. The grownups they’ve turned into today will always be the little kids before their schooling years frolicking in the sun. That’s just the way it is. Safe within the comfort of our mind’s window seat, time will always be still and frozen. Are these to be the makings of a sentimental fool? Perhaps, though no one will admit it.
