Growing
up, all of the kids heard the stories.
Take
a Twinkie, keep it wrapped, and place it on the railing of the
stairs to your house. Come back in one hundred years. Stairs might
be destroyed. The house might be gone. But somewhere in the area
will be that Twinkie… safely wrapped and fresh as the day it was
baked.
Sure,
I was skeptical then, and I remain a non-believer of the legend
today. Still… I didn’t begin a test. I have no evidence that it
wouldn’t be there in one hundred years. (Or, giving it a bit of
thought, if I did begin a test (and it is at the very least possible
I did place a Twinkie on some counter): (1) The Twinkie has been
taken or moved, or, (2) I have forgotten where I placed it and
haven’t seen it once in the four-plus decades since. I have no
evidence. (As I give this more and more thought, I know where
the damn Twinkie is. Peabody Drive. I left it at Nana’s house.
(Darn it!)))
Ok…
back on track… while Twinkies may have an expiration date, with
the rumors about the century-long shelf life generally agreed
upon as false, the funny thing is, time does move along. The days
pass, months pass, years pass, and there are places where we see
it while others barely seem to age at all.
There
were three houses that held special meaning for me as a child.
My home, and then the two belonging to grandparents. Give me a
set of car keys, place me in my home state, and I could bring
us to any of the three driveways. I can still picture certain
unique parts of the houses… trees, gardens, clotheslines, even
a stagecoach-like wheel partially set in the dirt and resting
against a fence.
Funny
thing though, none of the houses look the same today as they did
decades ago. New colors. New additions. New landscaping. And it
hasn’t been one hundred years since my childhood. In fact, not
one of those houses was around one hundred years ago.
How
long does it take for a year to pass?
Ok,
yes, strange question since there are measurements that allow
for a standard and accurate answer. More to the general idea,
it does seem different as an adult than it did at other points
in my life.
When
I was younger, the length of time I would be in school seemed
like an eternity. For some reason, I can recall a day in fourth
grade when I was thinking about still having eight years of school
to go after that one was completed. Outrageous. How would I make
it?
These
days, I could be on the computer making reservations for a trip
six months in the future (or further out than that), and it sure
feels like as I close the web browser I need to pack my luggage
and get in the car to drive to the airport for my flight.
There
are branches of science that discuss things like velocity. They
might examine different situations where objects may in one fashion
be moving at the same speed even though they are in another way
moving at different speeds. (I think, say for the example of two
points on the same record, the ideas were called angular velocity
and linear velocity. But this is not intended to be a class on
physics or such.) Often, I find myself stretching this concept
to explain how a child and an adult might view things like the
passage of time differently.
If
you want a funny example of how time moves and hits you in different
ways, look no further than a piece of wood. Two-by-four perhaps,
or even a fencepost will do. Keep them in the garage and they’ll
have that somewhat off-yellow hue for years upon years upon forever.
Leave the lumber in the yard, or get that fencepost set in the
ground, the gray seasoning will begin to appear quickly enough.
Inside the garage… outside in the yard… not even a difference
in temperature really. But the aging process… the weathering…
different.
Kind
of difficult to believe that Twinkie legend shouldn’t include
a disclaimer about placing it outside. Then again, without some
context it can also be difficult to conceptualize two places on
the same solid object covering different lengths when in motion.
I
don’t feel any different on my birthday. At least not physically.
Of course, that brings with it the idea that I’m the same now
as I was last year, and two years ago, and ten years ago (or more).
Which, yes, isn’t true at all. But then again, I’m not wrapped
in plastic and stored in my garage.