Walking the Wall

My friend and I were sitting in her kitchen chatting about this and
that and nothing at all and I was thinking about how nice it was, being
on spring break, sitting and just talking at the table with her. She
must have been thinking the same thing because later in the
conversation she brought up how things have changed so much since our
kids were little. She remembered a close neighbor that she was always
visiting when her first child was a baby and if she wasn’t at her house
than her friend was at her house. People used to drop by out of the
blue for a cup of coffee and a chat, went to bowling leagues, had
monthly bunco parties with friends. I remember always living nearby my
sister in law when our kids were babies and always being in one
apartment or the other–she and my niece even lived with us for 6
months during Desert Storm when my brother was waiting for deployment
in California. You would think in a small apartment, two babies, three
adults that it would be trained at times–but it never was. I could see
how cultures who lived together in families gained something by that
internal community. We helped each other with our children, we divied
up the shopping and cleaning and cooking–we made pans of rice crispy
treats, not for our babies who had no teeth, but for ourselves. It was
a good six months.

I remember when I was younger, we were always
dropping in on my mom’s friends, or my aunts, the kids running off to
play while my mom and whosoever sat with a cup of coffee and talked. I
remember an older couple in the apartment above ours waving us up from
the courtyard and we’d run up for an ice cream cone and a talk at the
table. I’m not blind enough to think that everything in the past was
rose colored, but I do think that we’ve lost a little bit of the
connectedness.  My friend today pointed out that people are so
busy that if you drop in on someone you know that you are keeping them
from something, our days are so mapped out and filled to the brim. But
on the other hand, how do we carve out time to just be and to connect
to our friends and our family? During the school year I’m teaching my
children and doing my homework for my schooling, and keeping the house
running and the errands done, and…and…and…

Everyone has the
same amount of time, we each have 24 hours in a day, no more, no less.
There are a hundred and one reasons why we don’t have time for this or
that–why friends slip through the crack, why we don’t see family
enough, why we don’t have time to stay connected to our community of
friends and family and neighbors. Society will always morph and change,
but there are some changes that aren’t healthy ones. I need to go to
bed earlier and wake up earlier and make sure that I have time for a
cup of tea and a chat–I truly believe that eternity is every moment,
not somewhere in the future, and I hate to think that I am rushing
through my moments of eternity and missing out on what truly
counts–people.