Time in a bottle

Paul Kadarian

I’m turning 69 on October 13 and realize with shocking clarity (and just plain shock) that it means I’m rapidly approaching my eighth decade on Earth. I stink at math but I used my fingers and confirmed it after several attempts to dispute it. Fingers don’t lie.

Eight decades. Meaning I’m almost done with seven decades, or a half century plus a score, which when I put it that way is not quite as scary.

I don’t know where the time went but do know many of my favorite songs have to do with that theme, like “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” “Time in a Bottle,” and “Time, Time, Get the Hell Away, Don’t Y’all Come Back Another Day,” which isn’t a song, but a reasonable sentiment approaching one’s eighth decade.

I started dissecting decades because it’s fun to trip down memory lane, and also a way of making sure you haven’t completely lost your marbles and can still remember things. I grew up in Seekonk starting in 1953, the first few years of which are foggy, but I do remember clearly one day standing in my crib and looking out the window and crying as my mom hurried to bring in the madly flapping laundry on the line under a sky thickening darkly with an approaching thunderstorm.

I also remember Interstate 195 not being there in front of my house until it was built around 1960. It was farmland before that, all the way from our house on Cole Street, which my parents built just before I was born, all the way to Fall River Avenue several hundred yards away. It was blissfully quiet for years until 195 came in and with it, great curving entrance and exit ramps maybe 100 yards from my house which to me, just seemed like they’d always been there.

Another bit of motorized memory: from my house, I could hear the rhythmic roar of racecars floating across the highway from the Seekonk Speedway maybe a couple miles away as the crow flies – itself an expression that I always felt reflected the then-country nature of where we lived.

The 60s where a whole lot easier to remember and were when my decades really started to get cool. Not counting hitting puberty. Hitting puberty should really be called “puberty hitting you,” because does it ever. Your body and mind and entire existence changes by the minute and nothing is ever the same. Had I the capacity to do so back then, I’d forgo the puberty process and just wake up one day wondering what the hell happened to me and then deal with it.

The 60s were also a very confusing time for everyone; the Vietnam War was raging, and I remember fighting with my dad about the war as I got closer to the age of worrying about it impacting me. I’d yell that I’d go to Canada if I got drafted, he’d yell that I damn well would NOT go to Canada if I got drafted. And neither of us were absolutely sure if we meant what we yelled.

I graduated Seekonk High School in 1971 and the draft was still on but was then determined by lottery and I got number 269. Funny how you remember key numbers, like phone (ED6-7741, Social Security (shh, it’s a secret), high school locker combination (37-10-4). And lottery draft numbers that kept your ass from getting blown away in a needless war.

The 70s rolled in and with it some of the best music of my lifetime (not counting disco, disco did and will forever suck). The Doors, Jethro Tull, Chicago, Santana, Elton John, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and on the folksy side, James Taylor, Aztec Two-Step, Tom Rush… too many to mention, but all of it music I listen to now and ache for the return of the times they embodied, mainly because it would mean I could go back to the old dinghy Rhode Island Auditorium in Providence to hear acts like many of the above-mentioned.

The 70s were also a blur; it was the 70s, after all, a decade in which, I like to say with hippie pride, I smoked more weed than Cheech ‘n Chong, a lot of that in airplane bathrooms when I was flying all over as a young, stoned, girl-chasing flight attendant. Had a helluva time. From what I can remember.

Then life changed forever for the better with the 80s and the birth of my two kids, one of each gender, and way down the road, the birth of the center of my universe, my grandson, Mikey. It was also the decade I figured out I wanted to be a writer and worked for 15 years at the Taunton Daily Gazette as a reporter and editor, and also columnist writing under the umbrella of the three S’s – Snark, Sarcasm, and Satire. That, I’m happy to report, hasn’t changed a bit.

Fast forward past a dissolved marriage and then finding new love, a career as a travel writer jetting all over the world (not stoned because people can change, even old hippies) and finding my new, current career as an actor, something I’d always wanted to do as a child but didn’t have the courage to try until my mid-50s.

And that’s the great thing about time, isn’t it? It’s your best, most easily accessed commodity to do with in your wishes, hopes, and dreams. Looking back over the past seven decades approaching my eighth, it’s hard to pinpoint the best days of my life because they’ve all pretty much been. Not every one of course, just most.

Like the Stones said in ’64, “Time is On My Side.” Always has been, even now with way more behind me than ahead. It’s all we got left and I aim to make the best of mine.