Faster than the speed of light

I now know what is faster than the speed of light, which is, for those of us rusty on the particulars, 186,000 miles/second. That's not really even a comprehensible number, given the circumference of the earth is nearly 25,000 miles. A bit of division finds that light would travel around it over seven times in a second.

What could possibly be faster? Time.

How can it be Christmas already? Didn't we just celebrate it? We had to say goodbye to beloved cat Pyewacket two days before Christmas last year. Has he already been gone that long?

We've been back from the most glorious trip for over four weeks. How can that be? Did the three weeks we were gone just evaporate? Where did they go? Just memories destined to fade?

And yet...

It seems another lifetime that I myself was a first-time mother. I look at the photos and wonder, who is that? Was that me?

The hours can be slow, the weeks quick, the years... faster than the speed of light.

A trip down memory lane

Yesterday we celebrated grandson Jack's second birthday at the Love Field Museum of Flight, but that's another post. This one centers on what happened afterward.

Needing to discuss Thanksgiving plans, we adjourned to a nearby Mexican restaurant, Cantina Laredo in Inwood Village. As my son was telling me the location, my mind was skittering back to my childhood and teen years. I knew the place, but by another name. I'd practically grown up there when it was an El Chico's, as my dad had had business in Dallas nearly every weeknight. It was cheaper to feed the family--and far more efficient as far as he was concerned--to go to Dallas and pick up the parts he needed for the next day's repairs than to wait for them to arrive via the bus or mail. My mother liked El Chico's.

We made friends with the other regular customers and had our favorite waitress. We even attended her wedding mass. I think she later divorced.

I was interested to see if any of the old was left to the place. I remembered it as being very very pink. And huge. There was an upstairs where we rarely ate as it would have been reserved for parties. There were two paintings, very large, on opposite side walls. One was of a beautiful young Mexican woman reclining in a garden and the other of an Aztec sacrifice, complete with stone altar and young maiden. What would remain?

Not the pink. No telling how long that had been gone. The ceiling was lowered, there was a bar down one side, where there had been booths (pink), and the place had shrunk. Hmmm. But the paintings were still there and they too seem smaller, but still too large for any wall in my home. The place wasn't as brightly lit either as I remember it. The ambiance was just different. The food was very good and the service great.

As far as that goes, there wasn't the $1.99 plate of enchiladas, either.

The times, they do change.

So which decade are you in?

All this hype about it being a new decade. Okay, people, let's all raise our fingers in front of our faces. Got 'em up there?

Count. Starting on the left. One, two, three... you know the drill. What's on the far right? Your little right pinkie finger is what when you're counting? That's right: ten!

That would be, the end of a ten. 2010. Next year's the end of the decade. I did hear a commentator on one of the XM Public Radio stations state that yesterday, so I know I'm not alone in this conviction. But perhaps we are just so ready to get rid of these first years of the 21st century, that we (media, you know who you are) have found a convenient way to package them up, tie them with a virtual bow, and push them back in a corner. Ah... 2010. A new decade.

Or not.

But these first years have been a difficult labor and birth process. Fetching the newspaper this morning, I looked up at our now-nonfunctioning (by choice, ours, not its) front yard light. Ten years ago, on the morning of Jan. 1, 2000, we had come in from spending the night elsewhere and found that a brick had been thrown through one of the glass panes. Happy New Year, someone had said and smashed part of our glass. We put it back together, much as we've been seeking to put ourselves back together in the wake of 9/11 and the Iran/Afghanistan miseries, terrorism on our shores and the recession. Now that I think about it, perhaps it is best to bundle it all up, declare a new decade, and march on.

But on a personal level, it's been a good decade. Both sons out of college/grad school, both married to wonderful women, two grandchildren healthy and growing. We've been privileged to travel to Australia not once, but twice! We've made new friends and learned to treasure old ones more deeply.

Happy New Year, no matter which decade you think you're in.