Since I penned my last First Person (actually I wrote it on a computer), I had a big birthday (85) which was an occasion for some looking back. One such item was a piece I wrote 35 years ago in a Washington newspaper (the Evening Star) when I was 50 and practicing law (BAR was just a little start-up published out of my law office and not even mentioned in the piece):
Monetary inflation is an overriding concern of almost everyone. Nothing commands more serious analysis in government halls or more space in the media.
Yet another form of inflation, equally insidious, is completely ignored.
I refer to time inflation. A day, a week or a year is simply not worth anywhere near what it used to be.
In a couple of months (which, these days, is likely to pass by almost as quickly as I can write these lines) I will turn 50. I have checked with my friends and contemporaries, people of sufficient age and maturity that their judgment can be trusted, and they agree to a person that in recent years the pace of time has accelerated enormously. There can be no doubt as to the existence of runaway time inflation.
I remember my piano lesson as a child. That hour would go on forever. It seemed like a night and a day. I would begin to yawn part way through and somehow wake up near the end. Recently, I started taking piano lessons again. I have my lesson on Tuesday mornings before work. Hardly have we finished refining a single page when it is time for me to trudge off to the office.
As a youngster (that word is not used any more), I remember counting the days before my birthday or a weekend trip out-of-town. Each day would plod on endlessly, each part a separate, lengthy segment. Now there is hardly such a thing as anticipation. Before you know it, the long-awaited event is past.
Occasionally I have a fancy expense-account lunch in a downtown restaurant. I recently held out a dollar bill to the hatcheck girl in one of these places and asked for change. She looked at my dollar bill and said, “That is change.” That’s the way I feel about a week now. That is change. I go to work, come home tired, have dinner with my family, read the paper and go to bed—and another week has passed.
Even the years are not what they used to be. When I was a freshman in college, it was beyond my imagination that I would ever be a senior. Seniors were another generation. In any event, I was sure I would be a college student forever. That was my permanent niche in life.
Now I have to think what year it is. Even happy annual events pop up and are here so soon. When we start packing for our week at the beach, it’s that time again. I remembering driving home from the beach last year. It seems like yesterday.
I am absolutely sure I am not 50. But for this time inflation, I would be about 11, at most 37. How do I know? When I crawl into bed every night, I curl up on my side and adjust the pillow exactly the way I did as a boy.
During the day, I sit rather pompously at a pretty large desk, but at night when I curl up with my head on that pillow, I know that I’m the same little boy who grew up in a little town called Sharon, Pennsylvania, and not the lawyer who sits at that desk during the day. Inside, I know I haven’t grown up a bit. I’m no wiser, no surer of myself, no less full of wonder, no less excited by life’s mysteries. So how can I be 50?
It’s the time inflation that’s robbed me of those years. And it’s about time someone did something about it—the president or Congress or someone. At least appoint a commission to study the problem.
If nothing can be done about it, at least recognize its existence: When you see me on the street, please understand that by using any reasonable standard of time, I am not that old.
Since I penned my last First Person (actually I wrote it on a computer), I had a big birthday (85) which was an occasion for some looking back. One such item was a piece I wrote 35 years ago in a Washington newspaper (the Evening Star) when I was 50 and practicing law (BAR was just a little start-up published out of my law office and not even mentioned in the piece): Monetary inflation is an overriding concern of almost everyone. Nothing commands more serious analysis in government halls or more space in the media. Yet another form of […]
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