Taking time for paradise

When we need a place to go home to

The Savannah River near Augusta, Ga., as seen from a nearby canal levee.

Over the weekend, I took a 7-mile-long walk along the Augusta Canal near my parents’ home, in the city where I was born and grew up. I was in town to get together with my mom, dad and sister — my (original? first?) family — for the occasion of my mother’s 81st birthday.

Most of the time, when I’m coming home for a visit I bring along with me my wife and one or both of our kids — at the very least, my son tags along with me when the rest can’t make it. But this weekend, it was just the four of us, which was a bit like traveling back in time.

Without my “today” family in tow, I was with the family I grew up with all those years ago. When it felt like so much was happening and nothing was happening at the same time, when I couldn’t wait to “shake the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and see the world,” to borrow Jimmy Stewart’s line from It’s a Wonderful Life.

Time feels like a constant. (Even though, as we all found out in science class, it actually isn’t.) And, of course, a minute passes by where I am in the same amount of time it takes to pass where you are right now.

But when I leave Atlanta for a visit home to Augusta, it’s like escaping a fast-spinning planet’s gravitational pull. I can feel time slowing down. The minutes don’t tick away as quickly; afternoons seem to just sit still as the breeze blows through on my parents’ back porch.

Now, history’s legendary names in science and philosophy say there’s something to this, which writer Eric Barker talked about in this week’s issue of his fantastic newsletter. Basically, he says, the feeling of time speeding up or slowing down in response to what happens in our lives isn’t an illusion:

“Per Aristotle, if nothing is happening in your life, if there’s no change, you forget those moments. Time collapses. And like Einstein, our internal time is not universal. A moment can be very meaningful to me and be irrelevant to you. And, like quantum mechanics, when you look back on your life, all that matters are moments in relation to other things: to our feelings, to our values, to other people.

But Newton isn’t letting us off that easy. He’s still there. If we don’t make the most of those hours on the clock, we don’t create the moments that will matter to us internally. And clock time so often slips through our fingers. So how do we control time?

Well, we can’t. But we can make time special so it registers with us internally.”

That last line — making time special, so it strikes a chord inside us we’ll remember — hits home. Despite the jumble of emotions, anxieties and insecurities I remember feeling growing up, it feels like they’re fading away now, replaced by something I hadn’t noticed before, but maybe was there all along.

When I get back home from my walk, a couple of hours later, I see my mom lifting a big, heavy flower pot in the back yard. At 81, she still does a lot of physical things. She tells me later that she works in the yard at least a couple of days a week, and gives time to a garden club (she’s the president) and to the church I grew up in and my parents still attend.

It dawns on me how long she’s been doing this — the past 23 years, since she retired at age 58. She’d been working at her job for 35 years, so when it was time to retire, she was ready to go.

For some people I’ve known, retirement feels like a cliff they’ve fallen off. But my mom has filled hers with the same level of activity she expended when she worked. “Don’t stop doing things,” she told me this weekend. “Because when you’re my age and you slow down, you really slow down.”

Of course, the same house that today is a haven of peace for me is still a hive of activity for her. But she had her own haven away from the hectic busy-ness of her own life when we were kids, the small South Carolina town where she grew up and her parents then lived. We visited them almost once a month when my sister and I were really young.

Her parents passed away some 25 years ago, and not long after the house she grew up in was sold. She’s still continued to go home, though; with friends she knew as a child to high school reunions and funerals, and for weekends at the beach with a group of friends she’s known since grade school.

I know we are who we are, and we can’t be anyone else. But we also oscillate between different parts of ourselves, depending on the people we’re with and the places we are. In a way, what I think my mother has done is to keep a sense of home alive in those relationships, even when she can’t get back to the physical place anymore.

I’m not sure I even realized how important or meaningful this could be until I had my own family (relatively late in life). Years ago, I read a book by A. Bartlett Giamatti, the Yale University professor and president who became the commissioner of Major League Baseball in the late 1980s.

In the book, titled Take Time For Paradise, he writes about why home plate isn’t called “fourth base”:

“Meditate upon the name. Home is an English word virtually impossible to translate into other tongues. No translation catches the associations, the mixture of memory and longing, the sense of security and autonomy and accessibility, the aroma of inclusiveness, of freedom from wariness, that cling to the word home and are absent from house or even my house. Home is a concept, not a place; it is a state of mind where self-definition starts; it is origins — the mix of time and place and smell and weather wherein one first realizes one is an original, perhaps like others, especially those one loves, but discrete, distinct, not to be copied. Home is where one first learned to be separate and it remains in the mind as the place where reunion, if it ever were to occur, would happen.”

Think about it for a second: a baseball diamond is structured like the arc of our lives. You start at home, you venture out, you might get stuck out there for a while on one of the bases. You’ll experience failure, and you might experience astonishing things. But the goal, eventually, is to get back home — for Odysseus as much as for us, wherever home might be.

What do you think? Where is “home” — however you define it — for you?

Thanks, as always, for reading. As I write these words, I’m reminded that the French word “essay” means “to try”; so please know this is just an attempt to get at what this means. It’s by no means the last word, so I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Your friend,

— Terrell