It was 1962 and I was in fourth grade. The new My Weekly Reader had an article about how there was going to be a World’s Fair in New York City in 1964 and this made me furious. Why tell a kid about an event that was more than two years away! It seemed absurd. Two years might as well have been forever. It was as if My Weekly Reader was taunting me about how time passed so slowly.

Last Sunday I turned seventy years old. The New York Worlds Fair came and went a lifetime ago, and fourth grade is but a blip on the screen of my memory. When I was nine years old it seemed like nothing much had happened in my life, and time seemed to pass at a glacial pace. Time between each birthday seemed like an historical age. The changes that happened during those long years were important. Big blocks to create a foundation, and these blocks of events piled up slowly and only came up to about my knees. But now at seventy my memory operates with the speed of nuclear fission. My mind is full of billions of little events, buzzing in my skull like bees. The time between birthdays now seem like an instant.

As a child I suppose most of my attention was focused on play. As a productive adult my attention was on Work. As an old man my attention focuses on what play and work have created for me.

I loved being a child, and I love being around children now. Probably because play is a ritualized form of exploration. Arthur is at the beginning of learning what is out there, and I love watching him explore. “Be gentle with the dog or else she may snap at you.” “Don’t run faster than you can carry yourself without falling.” Life lessons we learn from playing.

Perhaps these differences in how time passes define the three acts of life. If childhood is about play and exploration, and adulthood is about finding meaningful work, old age is about rumination concerning play and work, and how they intermingle. Certainly it has for me because at its best play and work has found a balance in writing. I love writing now in a way I never did as a child or as a worker.

Most kids don’t appreciate time passing because they are too busy playing. As adults we race against the clock because we have so much to do to satisfy our need to own time. Time becomes a commodity. As old people we realize that we never owned our lives at all and time means less and less. Do we want to outlive all our friends? Of course we do but it is painful. We don’t control time at all, it simply piles us like the snow from a blizzard.

Jan and Arthur exploring by looking for birds.

Of course I’m not sure that any of this is really true. It’s more likely that I’m thinking of time and the stages of life because I have too much time on my hands. That is certainly how a successful and active adult would see it. I’m not as productive as I used to be. I’m projecting my philosophy because it is only where I find myself: seventy years old, and taking care of a beloved wife, and afraid of disappearance.

If play and exploration is the province of childhood, and hard work is the way of adulthood, then I think that gratitude and love are the pillars of old age. We squander time as children, we think of time as a form of wealth as adults, and we cling to what remains as we get older. Or maybe that’s just how it feels from this side of seventy.

Here is a poem that got a lot of notice some years ago when it appeared in the anthology of poems used for Poetry Out Loud. I have enjoyed watching young people reciting this poem over the years.

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