Time

Peter and I went to a mall briefly last evening. The mall has been there for about 4 years. It was constructed along a familiar stretch of Route 1, an ancient Boston-to-Providence postal road. Peter grew up in the next town. I once traveled that area routinely when I lived south of Boston. The mundane Saturday trip turned into a revelation about change, time and aging. 

The mall is upscale. The neighborhood we once knew well wasn't upscale at all. It was a dowdy compilation of 1950's and 1960's strip malls, frequented by working class folks from the neighboring mill towns. Bargain stores reined supreme back then. Fire-sale merchandise was prized. No more. 

We are in our 60's. Peter said he understood how his Swedish-immigrant grandmother felt when she used to be driven down Route 1 in her old age, our youth. She had seen the now-faded strip malls as intrusions into farmland and marshes along the roadside. She would gasp at the changes and express her feelings of being left behind by all the commercial proliferation. I doubt she associated that change with her own production of over a dozen children. 

After visiting the mall, we went to a pub which we frequented ten years ago, shortly after we met. It was Peter's birthday, and he had always loved their fish and chips back then. This proved to be another reminder that time waits for no one. 

The place was twice the size it had been. The tight village square it borders was almost unrecognizable. Neat new pavement and curbs lined widened streets. A new triangular park was planted very professionally with lush foliage. A huge new liquor store, built to resemble the buildings in the upscale mall nearby, proudly formed one whole side of the square. The pub's clientele was the same. Older Irish-Americans, who traditionally have peopled this more suburban section of Boston. Their surroundings were more glamorous. A huge flat-panel TV, tastefully juxtaposed to a rather grand gas fireplace. None of them seemed impressed. To the diner who had been eating there for the last decade, these changes had come gradually. 

All this exploration of change in time is not alien to a Bostonian of the past quarter century. But we are a shrinking group. Native Bostonians have fled to suburbs north, west and south. Boston is becoming another international metropolis, thanks to immigration and global corporatism. I see it as another upscale mall, only bigger and with more residential real estate in it. My surprise came from encountering the seismic ripple effects of the downtown changes.

Time is change. Life is change. There is no control over it, no matter how much we choose fret about it. This is a very basic consciousness of my own humanism. Courage is required to try to make an impact of goodness on a world which is changing outside of my individual control. Those who have children and grandchildren often delude themselves into thinking that they exert some control over the planet's future by their reproduction of progeny. However, when they are encouraged to look at their own familial truths, they will acknowledge that they have had little or no control over the eventual development of the individual human beings they brought to life...no matter how hard they tried. Influence, yes. Control, no.

Earlier yesterday I saw a man standing on a surfboard-like craft in Boston Harbor as we walked along. He had a long, slender paddle, with which he steered and steadied his craft. I watched as he sudden hit the outflow of the tide from a man-made lagoon. The whirling current was most likely less visible to him at sea level. The change nearly threw him off his board. We watched him regain balance and struggle with his paddle to get on with his journey. He did a good job. 

Standing upright when suddenly swept along with the inevitable change of life, like paddling across an often invisible current. Is easier with a personal daily practice.