I can’t stop time.

And neither can anyone else, not much solace but solace nonetheless. Though when I really mull that over, how would it work? Would it be like Groundhog Day with a sliver of my life on perpetual repeat or Freeze Tag except there’d be nobody to unfreeze me?

So I’ve come to accept I need to roll with whatever time brings. There’s been plenty of good such as my wife, kids, grandkids, friends, health, financial security…typical stuff any normal person would want or need.

Which makes me sound like I’ve become a boring old fuck.

Perhaps, but there is more to it. If anything, easing out of a stressful career has left me with a freed brain and too much time on my hands to allow me to morph if I choose to. Not that I was ever a dull, neurotic workaholic worried about my job, but I lived with constant paranoia about things going awry and affecting my income. It was a bug in my operating system which controlled my mood and whatever little joie de vivre I sporadically exhibited. Good thing my wife married me before I embarked on that career, not that my previous one was much of a mood-enhancer.

I think she likes how I’m evolving, which raises questions as to why she stuck with me all those years aside from purportedly decent sex and me being the father of her children. She believed I hauled around some “angry young man” thing far too long, but I disagree. I never got unnecessarily angry…I merely never had tolerance for bullshit or people trying to get over on me.

But my wife also correlates my evolution in part to my hair turning almost white, as though the change in color makes me less demonic, smile more and glare less. That makes sense only if the color correlates to age which then correlates to mellowing, but why does my hair color suddenly make me seem more approachable to random people when I’m out in the wild? It’s been recently exemplified by two other old white-haired guys, as though having a mostly full head of white hair was their ticket to engage me to discuss our shared enjoyment of wandering a bookstore and lamenting about gym workouts. It’s not like I’m some happy idiot, smiling and looking for conversation while perusing books or pushing weights around.

There’s more than the hair to corroborate I’ve mellowed enough to have her want to stick around. She’s been pushing for us to travel, which I’m OK with but only within my comfort zone of 8-10 days. We like to travel with friends which often means compromising on place and duration, which somehow routed us to Ireland several months ago. I didn’t have a particular interest as the culture, history and vacationing with the constant threat of mist and rain held no appeal, the latter the primary reason we haven’t yet gone to Scotland, her parents’ birthplace where other family members still reside.  

So I agreed and we found a 7-day “Taste of” tour and looked into hopping over to Scotland for a few days afterwards, but as luck would have it her family wasn’t going to be there so we pivoted and tacked on a couple of days in Liverpool. Not that I was such a big Beatles fan but it seemed interesting enough and I’d be home in 9 days. I kept asking myself, “Why am I here?”…at the Guinness factory, at the Blarney Rock, on the bus avoiding head-on collisions on tight roads while the driver pointed out herds of sheep and cows, and especially at a roadside tourist trap store where they sold overpriced genuine Irish everything.

And I did not become a bigger Beatles fan even after touring Lennon and McCartney’s childhood homes, seeing Penny Lane and being otherwise Beatled to death.

But I rolled with it and had a good time despite being damp most of the trip.

And I also recently rolled with a day trip to Woodstock, NY, a place we last visited back in ’09. My wife’s memories were frozen in time about a place that was itself frozen in time, so I finally gave in. What we found was a town still frozen but not in an interesting way with the highlight being lunch in the one open restaurant, which we stretched out to warrant the 6 hour round trip. As we climbed back into the car she started to tell me something about something she saw and I cut her off with, “Remind me the next time I never come back here”, which rolled quite easily out of my mouth.

Thank God I hadn’t lost that capacity.

It comes in handy, not necessarily as a weapon but as proof I’m not going totally soft. It’s never meant to hurt anyone, especially my wife, but sometimes I can’t help myself. For years she teased me about my various difficulties or inabilities to perform routine physical tasks. I never considered myself graceful but also never had a problem accomplishing what I had to get done. On the other hand she did consider herself graceful…women are generally more graceful than men anyway, and could perform those same routine tasks with more fluidity.

She busted on me when it became difficult for me to sit cross-legged or touch my toes, attributing it to my lack of stretching regimen, but it ended up due to needing a hip replacement. She busted on me when new bifocal contact lenses forced me to slightly tilt my head at an odd angle to read, subsequently remedied with a refitting, whereas she has her own weird vision stuff entailing prescription issues and misplacing her multiple pairs of glasses all over our house. And she’s recently started busting on me about how I put my underwear on. That activity has never been one I gave much thought to…it’s something I’ve been doing successfully for years. I have no specific method and can do it while sitting or standing, though if the latter I steady myself with one hand while doing so. But that seems to upset her. “Why can’t you do it without holding on? Let me see how long you can stand on one leg. You know, it’s dangerous to not have good balance…I think you need to work on it.”  

What the fuck??

After several episodes of listening to variations of that I had enough, dropped all pretense of rolling and mellowing and lost it, “I’m not auditioning for the fucking circus I’m just trying to get my fucking underwear on. And no, I’m not going to practice standing on one leg. Just be happy I change my underwear every day. And by the way, you have the wrong glasses on.”

Instead of thinking about balancing on one leg or ruminating on my relationship to time and change, maybe I should focus on not being so malleable. I’m beginning to think it doesn’t suit me.

And I’m not going to dye my fucking hair.

So bring it on, Q-Tips….