Time in a bottle….

Showing my age again, I’m sure, but I always liked the song “Time in a Bottle” by Jim Croce. I’ve been thinking a lot about time this week due to the planning of my sister’s 50th birthday party with my niece. As a part of the planning, I have been digging out old photographs of my sister, and I have to say, laughing at the styles.

This one of my sister and I was taken on the first day of school in 1971 when I started kindergarten. She was 12 and I was 4 and a blonde. And no clue what was about to happen to me or the many directions my life was going to take. My sister’s dress has turtles on it. Very styling! She was pretty cool for a big sister. She walked me to class and made sure I was okay.

Then the pictures progress in photographs and in my mind - other first days of school and with me, I was always at a different school. Sometimes I attended more than one school per year. I was always the new kid with something to prove. It was tough at the time but looking back it helped me too.

Now I’m 42 and starting to gray. I color my hair red and brown and dirty blonde and whatever else strikes my fancy. I’m never afraid to meet new people now. I feel fairly confident in who I am and what I believe and what I think. I like to think I am still open to change and possibilities and I realize there is more to life than the life I am leading now. And there is always the opportunity to grow. I’ve watched my own daughters go through school and face first days and now they are both in college which feels weird but good.

While in the throes of raising my daughters, I always thought my job as a parent was to put myself out of a job. In other words, to raise independent children who could stand on their own two feet and for the most part I feel I have been successful. They really are independent - one living far away in Kansas City, Missouri where she is in her Junior year at Kansas City Art Institute as a sculptor major and the other living at home but working and attending college at Greenville Technical College and taking care of herself.

As I look again at the picture of myself on my first day of school, I have to wonder what was going through my mother’s mind when she took this picture. And as I look at my daughters I am so proud of both of them – of their abilities and capabilities and their success in the world and the young women they have become, and I am overwhelmed by how time has moved along.

This morning my youngest called me at work to say she had been in a car wreck -- a fender bender. It was nothing really. No one was hurt except the cars, but it got me to thinking again. Time is short and anything could have happened but thankfully didn’t and perhaps some day she too will have children and they will drive and call her scared and upset about a fender bender and she will be reminded how short time can be but usually isn’t and be as grateful as I am that there is still more time to capture.


Time in a Bottle by Jim Croce – 1972

If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that Id like to do
Is to save every day
Till eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you
If I could make days last forever
If words could make wishes come true
I’d save every day like a treasure and then,
Again, I would spend them with you

But there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do
Once you find them
I’ve looked around enough to know
That you’re the one I want to go
Through time with

If I had a box just for wishes
And dreams that had never come true
The box would be empty
Except for the memory
Of how they were answered by you

But there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do
Once you find them
I’ve looked around enough to know
That you’re the one I want to go
Through time with