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| Campfire Girl and Bluebird Pins - Time Flies |
In first grade I learned to “tell time,” filling in worksheets with clock faces and hands pointing different directions. Telling time came easily to me, learning the small hand on the three means :15, on the four means :20, and so on.
One
could say I practiced math in my home by learning to subtract 15
minutes from any number on the clock. My parents always set the
clocks 15 minutes forward – I suppose, to give margin to our
schedule. The message it ended up sending me is, it never really is
whatever time the clock says it is; I really have more time than is
represented by the timepiece.
“I
don't have TIME to go to the bathroom,” I often heard my mom
sigh throughout her busy days in my childhood home.
At a women's retreat where we were going to do a skit including some hymns, I wondered why, even though I grew up in the same
church as many women present, they knew they some completely
unfamiliar-to-me hymns. After asking around, I learned it was because the hymns we were performing
were songs sung in the beginning of church services. I knew all the
songs we sung at night church, and I knew all the songs of invitation
and commitment sung at the end of morning services but had never heard the
songs sung at the beginning. “Just as I am” and “Have You Any
Room for Jesus?” were woven into my being, but “Oh, for a Thousand
Tongues” was foreign to me, both the tune and the words.
I am not
exaggerating when I say our family was NEVER on time for morning
church. There was a “late room” attached to the west balcony in
our sanctuary. A speaker was mounted high on the wall for latecomers
to hear the sermon. This was our usual place of worship.
However, if we were only, say, ten minutes late or a
less-than-embarrassing amount of time, we would sneak in (as though
no one would notice a family of eight tiptoeing in) behind the pews
in the sanctuary to sit on some folding chairs tucked above and
behind the pews. Once, one of the three pastors sitting on the
platform jokingly whispered to the pastor next to him, “We can
start now. The Carvers are here.”
Bluebirds
fly up to become Campfire girls after third grade. A ceremony was
held in the amphitheater at Ganesha Hills Park in our
city, Pomona, to commemorate the big event. I was dressed up in my uniform excited to “become a
Campfire girl” at my flying-up ceremony. When I and my family
arrived, alas, my group had already flown without me. Time flew a little faster than our Volkswagen van traveled across Valley Boulevard then up White Avenue to get us to the park.
I wanted to turn back
time so I could experience my special moment. My dad was comforting
me while I cried. Then my mom came up with an idea, trying to make
things better, and said, “Paul, let's just do a fast little
something of our own.” They retrieved my pin from my leader,
arranged a fake ceremony for me on the grass behind the amphitheater and flew through the motions, with
my siblings lined up and looking on while I walked across a pretend
stage to receive my pin from my dad.
Fast
forward ten years. My mom is driving my brother and me to high
school. She is going 45 miles an hour in our VW van down Monte Vista
Avenue with the car in second gear. “Mom,” you need to shift
gears,” my brother pointed out. “I don't have TIME to switch
gears,” my mom said. That year my brother and I were late for school every
day. We found out at the end of the year our mom thought school
started at 7:45, when it started at 7:35.
For
Saturday parades in which I marched for drill team, I was required to
have a brand-new pair of Legg's Suntan pantyhose for each
performance. Every Saturday we would race to 7-Eleven to pick up a
pair of pantyhose on the way to the school. There was no time to
plan ahead for this known need, so the purchase of pantyhose was
treated as an urgent surprise each week.
Sometimes
my siblings and I waited over an hour to be picked up from choir
practice at church. We would use the payphone in the patio to call
our mom and got a busy signal. My sister Susan knew how to call the operator to interrupt a phone call, and she would eventually get through. After piano lessons, sometimes I would wait for a ride home sitting through the next
person's 30-minute lesson then sit on a chair against the wall in
Ruth Calkin's dining room watching her back while she typed prayer
poems at her table. So arriving to places on time was challenging, as well as getting picked up from places, due to a seeming lack of time.
Two
words come to mind when I think of time: “not enough.”
When I
was in my early 30s sewing Flintstone costumes for three of my four
children (Ryan wanted to be Hideo Nomo, a baseball pitcher, rather
than be Fred or Barney), I was piecing together with frustration
Wilma's necklace. It was taking more time than I thought it would,
and I had to keep ripping seams from the large felt pearls to get it right.
A messy house surrounded me. “I don't have time to sweep the
floor,” I said with tears streaming down my face. “I don't have
time to vacuum. I don't have time to do the dishes.”
Four-year-old Karis, seeking to bring comfort to me in my obviously desperate state, came close to me and said, “But
you have time to sew Wilma's necklace.” Her wise words ushered me
into the present, to the task at hand, the one thing that was
allowed to be on the front burner of my priorities -- sewing Wilma's
necklace.
I
sometimes re-live that scene when I find myself thinking of all I am
NOT doing. Jesus was not healing people when he was at a wedding
turning water into wine. He was not casting out demons when He was
walking with His disciples. When he was preaching in the synagogue,
he was not multiplying loaves and fish to feed the thousands. Yet He
had enough time to do His Father's bidding. He had enough time to be
who He was and accomplish what was at hand. And I have time to sew Wilma's necklace.
I am
learning to settle into the “now” of each moment, and it is a
process, my default being to treat time as though there is not enough
of it. Time will tell, as I learn to tell time.
What
would I tell time, if I could? “God created you to be a gift to
me. I will embrace you as my friend. Forgive me for not being
grateful for you or for trusting that you are enough.”
That's
what I would tell time, if I could.
Diane Mann, 2016
