COLUMN: Times Goes Faster in the Other Place

By Tobin Barnes
Recently traveled to my hometown to see family and friends. Usually go back there two, three, four times a year, maybe. Sometimes not so much.

It takes about five or six hours driving time. No big deal, really, but long enough to think about it before doing it or saying the heck with it.

Time on the road for me is dead time. And I can’t help myself thinking, I’ll be dead plenty long, so I don’t need to be dead even longer.

Needless to say, I avoid dashing out on long whimsical road trips.

When I was younger and more of my life was back there in my hometown, I’d go more often despite the drive. However, things have transferred. Now, most of my life is out here. So I tend to stay put.

Nevertheless, over the years of mostly staying here and sometimes going back there, I’ve noticed something about time. I’d almost say I’ve “discovered” something about time, but that’d sound pretentious, and heck, I’m no Norman Einstein, as Joe Theismann once admitted.

Besides, Einstein’s already been there and done that with time. Not only that, everybody comes to notice this thing I’m going to talk about sooner or later anyway.
Still, it’s fascinating stuff and bears discussion. So here it is (simple really):

In any two places, time passes at different rates. Anyway, as far as any individual is concerned.

Let me explain.

Here, where I live, time passes in a steady, almost hypnotic, drumbeat. It can almost lull me into thinking nothing much has been happening. Yes, time’s passage seems almost insignificant, except when I look back and realize how much is gone.

Oh, there’s some big events every once in a while but they’re amply padded and insulated amongst a multitude of small, if not mundane, events. Of course, some of those big events are good, some not so. But usually, there’s plenty of time between the big events to work them into the general landscape and allow them to become part of my mental scenery.

There’s a flow there, maybe a certain equilibrium. Some thinkers have compared time to a river, in that it’s always the same but always different. If that’s so, I’ve been on a raft, gently floating along that river, maybe hitting a rock here and a snag there.

Not so in my hometown.

From my perspective, things happen there in fits and starts. There’s no leisurely flow with ample padding and insulation between big events. Instead, time leapfrogs, sometimes at a breakneck pace.

When I go back to my hometown, almost every conversation with relatives and friends contains shocking revelations. This once eight-year-old child is in high school now. That teenager got married last year. Somebody else is getting divorced. Another person moved away, got married, recovered from a cancer scare, and moved back. And another did himself in.

All this comes at you with the not-so-subtle spacing of machine gun bullets. It’s like a whirlwind of information that’s been flying around out there in the ether. But you haven’t been around to absorb it and place it in its proper position on the timeline.

I think it was Woody Allen who said, “Time keeps everything from happening at once.” But when you go back to your hometown, things DO seem to happen at once because that’s when you learn about them. Other people’s lives in your hometown have become a blur.

It’s kind of like reading a short one-page biography of a famous person. Tragedies and accomplishments are piled so chock-a-block atop each other in such a small space, it makes you wonder how the historical figure could have endured such a roller coaster life of steep ups and downs. But of course what’s left out of those short biographies is all the padding and insulation of life. The stuff that evens things out.

Same with your hometown people, I guess.

On my last two hometown trips, I learned from others that four more of my high school classmates have died over the last some years. That makes five altogether now out of a class of only sixty-four or so. I’m not sure what the actuarial tables would say, but that seems a little high for only this far along.

And the thing is, last time I was around these people, we were in high school. And because I was not close to these particular classmates, next thing I know, they’re dead.

Now that’s shocking.

I can only hope there were plenty of good events in those lives, and not only that, but also a plentiful amount of comfortable, everyday moments of padding and insulation.