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Hunker Down with Kes

If Albert Had Just Reversed His Theory...

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When we were “younger, so much younger than today” we didn’t think nothing about Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It was just a term in a high school science book. When he started using words like cosmological and astrophysical, we just shook our heads and broke out a copy of Mad Magazine.

Lately, I’ve been seriously rethinking this whole notion of time, space, continuum, relativistic velocity and the intrinsic relationship between mass, energy and the overriding propensity of objects in motion to remain in motion...

Let me put this to you in good ole West Tennessee English. When I was a kid, time moved slower than frozen molasses.

Listen, I spent three days in one half-hour morning session of Miss Belle’s third grade reading class. I kid you not! And then we’d line up for those Friday afternoon spelling bees and we’d just stand there. And stand there. And stand...

Spring was the worst. It was perfect baseball weather! And the hands on that old Standard Time clock above the green alphabet strip high above the front of the class were not moving at all! It was some of that relativity stuff sucking us into one of Einstein’s famous black holes.

And we were just innocent children...

I loved Bro. L. H. Hatcher. I still do to this day. He made me feel like I was the most important person in the whole congregation. What a gift that was for a young child lost in an adult world at times. But let me tell you something, when he got to preaching on how Joshua and those Israelites surrounded the whole city of Jericho, time didn’t stand still—it turned around and ran in the opposite direction!

It got worse in high school. Football practices lasted an eternity. On the days that Doug Paschall, Tommy Heron and Bobby Roberts took turns running over me, it was longer than that!

And you don’t want to get me started on front porch sitting. The grown-ups did the sitting. And talking. And laughing. Us kids did the enduring. You hear those days now often referred to as “lazy, hazy, endless, carefree days of yesteryear”...let me tell you, the key word there is “endless!”

Time didn’t hardly move at all when we were children.

And most of y’all are way too young to understand the “relativity” of where I am going here. But as I have gotten older, time has speeded up.

A lot.

I’m pretty sure it has to do with Einstein’s astrophysical theory of time and space. Some of that “relativistic velocity” has finally jumped off those old textbook pages into real life. Captain Kirk called it warp speed.

Or maybe I’ve just graduated to the Twilight Zone.

I wake up thinking, “I’ve got a couple of things to do today,” but before I can get started on either one, dark overtakes me like a rapid moving apparition. The day just “went.”

There is some good news here, I don’t have to wait for Christmas like back in the old, slow days. It took forever when I was “wishing” for a Red Ryder BB gun. You get my age and buy something called an Xbox for a grandson and before you can get it paid for, you’re shopping for wireless earbuds, a Nike sweatshirt and two hoverboards for the NEXT Christmas!

I was singing Auld Lang Syne to welcome in the New Year just last week...and next week, May is upon us. The first four months of this year went by like fence posts out along new highway 22 when Leon was seeing how fast our 1960 Chevrolet would go.

We are getting dressed for an evening out and before I finish tying my shoes, Cathy will tell me I’ve got to change shirts. The one I have on has gone out of style. And let’s not talk birthdays at all. They are speeding by faster than Superman can leap a tall building!

We grew up working hard as we could to speed things up. And now, for the life of me, I can’t slow them down!

I’m still trying to enjoy every day, appreciate every friendship, live life as large as possible...just like me and Yogi, Ricky and Buddy approached every moment back in 1957.

I’ve just got to do it faster than ever before...Einstein’s cosmological clock is moving like a runaway freight train...

Respectfully,
Kes

PS: The absolute worst thing was putting your head down in the early elementary grades for 20 minutes after lunch for a mandatory rest period. You couldn’t talk, look around, throw peas at each other or roll ball bearings across the floor. Miss Dorothy didn’t even want you to breathe! Oh, how I wish I could find those 20 minutes today...