Since I started writing Flow Country essays for Lowcountry Weekly twenty months ago, twenty six of them have been published. Subjects of these short pieces have ranged from art and artists to mossy oaks to Gullah culture to the beach to interesting local places & people to my painted toenails…pretty much anything that sparked my curiosity and that my editor Margaret Evans considered fit to print.
It continues to be an amazing opportunity and I’m grateful. Especially because it allows me to think out loud and weave thoughts into the pieces about one of my recurring obsessions: time, as in big “T” Time.
Time as a construct, time as an illusion, melding of time tenses, memory-time, rates of time, non-linear time, “now” as a time, passing time, lost time, making up for time, appreciating time and time spent in recovery from other times. I’ve been able to connect aspects of how we experience time with what happens in this present occurring world.
For me, moving through various dimensions of time is like taking deep whiffs of the Spirit World, invisible as you navigate but felt as strongly as Pluff mud smells. As we point our noses to the future we dare to dream and hope.
Lately I’ve been thinking about dwindling time and bittersweet bites at the remaining bucket list apples. It hit me just the other day as I enjoyed a fresh peach picked up at a Sea Island Parkway stand when driving back from the beach. Delicious and ridiculously juicy, I froze for a half-second in the heat and wondered how many more peaches I would have in my lifetime and how many more times I would swim in the ocean. I hoped for at least 100 more peaches and 200 more plunges.
Then I realized how the indeterminacy of time made those calculations coldly irrelevant. Of course I could die tomorrow or way before I reached 200 swims. My math consisted of projecting 20 swims a year at my current rate (now that I live 26 minutes away from the water) and being physically able to jump in for a dozen more years at a slightly declining number per year. That requires living until 76 years old. Doable by medical standards for sure but you just never, ever, know how long you got.
That line of thought took me to specific bucket list items and my desire to visit the Art Institute of Chicago. My son Noah, the wayfaring barista with a minor in Art History, raves about it and I bought him a used book about it down at NeverMore Books last year. I’ve always wanted to go and never made it despite living six hours away in Cleveland for years.
So I seized the moment and just planned a father-son trip for the upcoming Father’s Day weekend. Grab, bite, chew and check off. The feeling of successfully beating back the march of time, that twisty tunnel of unknown exits and blind curves.
The writer Suresh Mirchumai offers this: Most of us do have this belief that the future holds more importance than anything else, the hope that all shall be fixed at a certain point in the future.
I can fix a gap in my museum exposure because I’m fortunate enough to be able to pay for a plane ticket, rental car, and a night in a budget hotel. It’s some other things that are harder or darn near impossible to fix, but that must be okay or despair will doom us.
Mostly these other things we hope to fix have to do with conversations un-had, time not spent, and attention not paid. That’s probably why Mirchumai concludes we hold up the future as so important—we want to get it right this time, we want another chance, we want another bite at the succulent sweetness of resolution and satisfaction of emotional desire. Sometimes we’ll even get it, a beacon of light simultaneously alongside intermittently dark surroundings.
It’s like the Magnolia trees we see around us in the Lowcountry. It always strikes me that after the tree blooms there is an inevitable journey from bright white blossoms to brownish deterioration among the collected blooms. The stages don’t seem to adhere to where they are on the tree, amount of shade or sun, or any other characteristic I can detect. The radiant white and brown decay might appear on adjacent branches, perhaps even touching each other in the breeze.
I’ve written previously about thinking that strands of Spanish Moss are like memories, wispy and always hanging around. For me, magnolias blossoms function like family genealogical charts: the dying blossoms will never return, and they stand for relatives who have passed. It’s the dreamy white ones, sometimes with shades of pink and purple, that are the ones we can still reach out and treasure in their current aliveness.
So if any of your bucket list things have to do with reaching out to family or friends and talking something out, or saying what needs to be said, or offering love in place of any other stuff that’s in the way. The key is, however you define or experience it, you have time to do it. There are 86,400 seconds in a day, and plenty of blossoms to consider.
