Pop Flies

This week we celebrate my daughter’s fifth birthday.  I will spare the reader all the clichés such events often inspire, such as “where did the time go?” and “boy, they sure do grow up fast.”  However, as far as I can tell, a week ago she was gumming a cheeseburger in a high chair like a ravenous dinosaur, yesterday she was toddling around the coffee table in pigtails scooting her toy train around a figure eight wooden railroad track, and today she will blow out five candles atop a little mermaid cake.

A half-decade has galloped past in a flurry of pink ponies ,“horsies,” and unicorns, and I have adored every single step.  Or, at least, those I wish to remember.

I was thirty-three years old when she was born, and so a lot of the dumb in my life had been removed, quite painfully on occasion, that could have kept me from being the father she deserved.  Parenting, of course, has been one interesting lesson after another, but perhaps the most important thing I have come to understand is that quality time is no substitute for quantity.  In fact, after parenting for five years, I don’t know if there really is any such thing as quality time in the first place.  I’m starting to think that quality time is a myth made up by busy people to justify busy schedules. 

I did not learn this lesson on fatherhood from a parenting manual or even from my own experience.  I inherited it, almost like DNA, as my own dad was very present.  Always.  When he came home in the summer after driving a tractor all day long, he would still play catch with us, no matter if his back hurt or not.  He helped coach our little league team, and I cannot remember a single basketball game he did not attend, even after the one when I shot at the wrong basket.

I could go on for pages, and if it was Father’s Day perhaps I would.  The point is, I have spent an enormous amount of time in my basement these last few years playing pirates, not because finding the pretend treasure was the most urgent thing on my agenda, but because it was the most important. 

This week also marks another milestone in my family’s history, one that is less celebratory, at least for those of us still living.  My aunt Jeannie died a few days before my daughter was born.  She was anxious to meet her new niece but in the end went home to God before having that chance.  Needless to say, that week was intense.  My father watched his sister leave this world two days before welcoming his first grandchild in to it.  I watched the sunrise through a delivery room window and watched it set through a funeral chapel vestibule.

Three years before she passed, Jeannie wrote a letter to me for my thirtieth birthday.  She never gave it to me, and instead it remained in a notebook.  This letter was just recently discovered, though, now some eight years after it was written, and given to me posthumously.

The letter is thoughtful, loving and funny.  Jeannie was thoughtful, loving and funny.  Towards the end of the letter she offers some advice.  “Don’t ever not so something because you don’t have time.”

At first glance the suggestion seems odd, almost cryptic, coming from her.  Jeannie was not a busybody.  She was not prone to filling her calendar with one task or social event after another.  The point she was making, I decided, after mulling it over in my mind, was not that we should fill our days with events.  I think her point was that we should not use time, or the supposed lack thereof, as an excuse. 

Translation:  if something is important enough to you, you will make time to do it.  If it isn’t, then you won’t.  Because in the end, we don’t really have any control over time anyway.  We only have control over our actions that take place within that time.

Thus, if we don’t read to our children, for example, it is not because we do not have time to read to our children. It is because reading to our children is not important enough for us to gather them around, sit in a chair, and open a book.  Unfortunately, that is a lesson not lost on anyone, regardless of how young they are.  Playing pirates tomorrow is a bad idea when the princess needs rescuing today.

The good news, though, since we do not have any control over time anyway, is that we can stop worrying about it.  The good news, since we can control our actions, is that we can start putting important things first and the supposedly urgent stuff second.  Not everyone has had good examples in their life from their past, but everyone can incite action that improves their future.

Some final words on time, written thousands of years ago in Psalm 90, asks God to “teach us to number our days.”  Again, at first glance, this might seem odd.  After all, how can we number our days if we don’t know how many of them we have?  That reality, though, is the point.  We do not know how many days we have, but we do know that they are limited.  A day will come when our days will end, just as they will end for everyone we know.  The actions we take within those days become our life stories.
           
I don’t know how many more days I have left to spend with my daughter, or my son, or with anyone
else.  I do know that someday those days will end, like a pop fly on the edge of its arc, and between
now and then I plan on playing a lot of catch.