A Paint-dab Mouse
4:24 PM, Monday afternoon. On the tiny clock, in the miniature bake shop, that is part of the porcelain village that I just put beneath our Christmas tree, the hands have just crept past three o’clock. In the morning, I suppose, for all the little buildings are illuminated. Even so, the well-painted inhabitants of the village are out and about, making snow men, shopping, decorating their own small trees. It may be the wee hours of the morning for them, but they don’t seem to mind. Time, they know, is relative.
When I was a child, the length of time between my birthday (December 12) and Christmas was approximately two-and-a-half months long. The school year lasted anywhere from eighteen to twenty-four months and Summer vacation was a long glowing blur of sun, goofing off, and lush green nights. Sometimes a single day and evening of play could last for fifty hours or more. I once spent an eternity on the beach, pretending that a bunch of oddly-shaped sea shells that I’d found were alien spacecraft (and no, that wasn’t just last year, wiseguy).
I seem to be experiencing temporal compression as I age, however.
It feels like about 6 months of time (certainly not more than a year or two) have passed since I graduated college. Yet my calendar tells me that over a decade has slipped by. Things move so much quicker, now. Holidays sweep by in colored blurs, months dissolve into weekends, years become a handful of photographs slipped into dusty albums and forgotten. Time was a vast thing to me, when I was a child: a geography that stretched out forever with glacial slowness.
Now time is the tiny flittering heartbeat of a paint-dab mouse, in a porcelain house, that is part of a little village, that glows beneath my Christmas tree.
— JWR, 12/15/97