Have I mentioned lately that I live in some kind of time warp? Because I do - I live in some kind of time warp. I’ve always been out of synch with not just people my age but with the pace at which other humans experience and process time.
Part of it probably has to do with not having kids (or grandkids, as some of the people I grew up with now have!). That puts you on a different conveyor belt, traveling at a different speed. But it’s not just that. Time seemed to move differently for me when I was a kid, too.
I think it’s mostly a perception thing. Until I got divorced from my first husband, even though I’d known him eight years, I still thought of him as “my new boyfriend.” (He was the second guy I ever went out with! So, compared to the first one, he was “new.”) Actually, in some quadrant of my brain, I still think of Brian, my husband now, as “the guy I met on Nerve.com,” and that was nine years ago. He’s also, “my new husband,” even though we’ve just celebrated our 7th wedding anniversary.
Because I don’t have a lot of money, I don’t buy a lot of new things, and so I keep things for remarkably long periods of time without realizing they’re long periods of time. For instance, this All Things Considered Tee Shirt. In the first photo, it is the fall of 2000. I’m on Slide Mountain in the Catskills, and I am about to turn 35. In the second photo, it is today, and I am in my dining room/kitchen, and I’m 46.5. I still hike in this shirt all the time - nearly 12 years later. But actually, the shirt is much older than that. I got it when my first husband went to the American Bookseller’s Association convention in 1990. (He sold book “accessories,” like brass bookmarks and Codependent No More toilet paper.) So this shirt has been in my life 22 years!
It wasn’t until I was going through some old photos this morning and found that one from 2000, that the age of the shirt dawned on me. That and its high quality! Not a hole, nor a frayed edge!
Update: PS I just remembered that I once met with a palm reader who was looking for a ghostwriter. After interviewing me, she insisted on reading my palm. “I’m sorry,” she said when she was done giving my hand the once-over. “It says here that you hold onto things for too long, so I can’t work with you.” I doubt she was talking about tee shirts. Probably she meant emotional baggage. Anyway, that was 14 years ago. It feels like yesterday… Lol.
