The Thing Time Forgot

THIS WEEK HAS IMMERSED ME in the baffling, sometimes freakish, elasticity of time. I’m more time conscious than ever before, probably because I’m 42 and not 22. And most of the time what I’m conscious of is how disorienting it can be. A movie on TV that I thought came out three or four years ago turns out to be 15 years old. My niece starts college, which is weird because she was in grade school a few weeks ago, I’m sure. When talk of high school, or my experience performing at Disneyland, or my early work days comes up, I have to say things like “20 years ago,” which inevitably puts a perplexed wrinkle between my brows. I have to resist the urge to count the years on my fingers just to make sure I didn’t add a decade by accident. But that’s a natural consequence of time, and one that, while unrelenting, is also utterly beyond control. All you can do is resign yourself to it. (Actually, that’s not true. You can obsess about it too. Trust me.) What’s more frustrating in a way is the way we distort time through our own devices.

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