TIME’S PRE-BOARDING CALL

I’ve been listening to music today, which I don’t usually do. But it’s been in conjunction with daydreaming, which I do a lot.

I have been staring into space imagining the music video I want to put on Youtube for my baby’s first birthday. This would be the baby that is not yet born, whom we refer to as "Who". I’ve had one of my current favorite songs in my head, and have been imagining the video footage I will be compiling over the next twelve months. Who’s first year: first meetings with grandparents, first experiences with snow, naps, tantrums, wide-eyed mugging for the camera, and marking territory with the dog. It will be a sweet, moving little archive of our baby’s life, and I find myself anxious to jump ahead a year and put it together.

Stranger still, as I’ve been sitting here rocking to my favorite iTunes (not rock n’ roll rocking, but more of an autistic back-and-forth that my family is all too acquainted with), I’ve been struck by songs that are going to make great soundtracks for Who’s second birthday movie, and third and fourth…

And it takes a while to stop myself and think, “Slow down! Let’s see if we get through the delivery first!”

It’s a funny little conflict between brain hemispheres: the one side full of hope and eagerness to know what this new life has in store, while the other is afraid of jinxing anything by daring to plan beyond the next diaper run. All the while, both sides of the brain remain mindful of life’s most unsettling truth: time flies.

I find myself thinking about what my parents might have been thinking the first time they measured my height, drawing a horizontal line along the bedroom wall. Did they imagine the future notches that would be dominating that corner of the room? Or the first time Dad was photographed reading “Twas the Night Before Christmas” to my eldest sister, did anyone dare to dream that decades later the tradition would have continued uninterrupted, with my sister’s baby, the first grandchild, in the picture this past year? Looking back, you can’t help feeling grateful that we’ve all made it so far, while at the same time being a bit freaked wondering where the time went.

It feels like too much to ask that I can experience such a streak of good fortune, yet here I am today, not just imagining my offspring’s long, happy life but being so bold as to arrange its musical score.

I want so much to know we’ll make it, but the sooner I know, the sooner it will be over. I can't believe this pregnancy is almost over. The baby’s not even born and it’s already growing up too fast. We’re barely taxiing on the runway and time is already flying.

Not only does time fly but it’s such a trippy continuum that as I write this sentence in 2007, my future self may be nostalgically perusing this entry in, say, 2017, possessing so much knowledge that I can only speculate about now. Of course, to my future self reading this, it is now. He’s reading this right now.

I hope he’s smiling.

And when he’s done reading this sentence, I hope he watches some home movies.